Some of what I share isn’t easy to express, or get, using the written word. I try to write in a way that might in some small way help you have an experience of what I’m talking about, or lead you to do something on your own that helps you have the experience. This isn’t always possible, though.

What I write about almost always comes from my personal experience. A full understanding requires a similar experience, in the same way that a full understanding of Mexico comes from having been there. Just hearing about it might be informative, but incomplete. Since I’m talking about some rather rare and esoteric experiences, with no foolproof recipe for making sure you have the experience (much less fully embody it) writing in a way that gives you the experience is difficult. In that case, the value comes in at least having some context for understanding the experience if you ever do have it.

Sometimes merely knowing about something is almost useless. If I tell you about my experience of emptiness you end up wondering what the hell I’m talking about because no written or verbal description can adequately describe it, any more than you could adequately describing to a child what it’s like to have sex (not that you should do that), or describing to a child what it’s like to be an adult.

Whether the experience is profound or mundane, you have to experience it for yourself in order to really know about it. Understanding this, for most people, is an entirely new way to look at life. Almost all people decide what is true and real based on what someone else tells them or on something they read. Though you’re reading something I’ve written, I don’t want you to use it as a source of information that you just swallow whole, but rather as an impetus to find out for yourself by sitting with it, and by trying on the perspective I suggest.

Though ultimately inadequate, an intellectual understanding does have some value. It can help you avoid confusion, it can help you to know what something is NOT, and it can help you better understand your own experience of what I’m sharing, if and when you do have one.

If you do come to experience a perspective I describe, the preview I’ve given you might help you recognize what is happening and save you some confusion. If you’ve already experienced some of these insights, this discussion will hopefully create additional clarity. Genpo Roshi has certainly helped me clarify a whole constellation of experiences and insights I’d had before I met him, helping me to understand and embody them much more deeply because of his help.

Each person has a view of the universe and how they (and other people) fit into it. I began this blog with a series of posts describing how these perspectives, these ways of understanding what it means to be a human being and how to deal with the human condition, develop–in other words, change as needed. Human development is, in fact, the evolution of increasingly sophisticated and more inclusive perspectives about what it means to be a human being, why we’re here, how to navigate through life, what it all means, why we suffer and die, and so forth.

I strongly suggest that you read (or review) these early posts, as they contain some very powerful information that will help you better understand your life. The main point, though, is that your perspective regarding who you are and what it means to be human develops. For some it doesn’t develop very far; for others this development continues throughout life. 

Why doesn’t development continue for everyone? Because we stick with our current view or perspective as long as it provides a workable explanation for the concerns and questions I listed above. Only when the old perspective no longer helps us successfully navigate our life are we pushed to develop a new and broader perspective.

The perspective I’ve been describing in recent posts is my attempt to describe the point of view of someone who is awake and aware, what some people call enlightened. I’m doing this in my words, based on my understanding (and limited by the fact that some of this is, really, impossible to fully impart in words).

I’m not saying that what I’m describing is an ultimate perspective, or that it’s better than some other perspective, including yours. Just in the last two and a half years since I’ve known Genpo Roshi I’ve had at least five or six major shifts in awareness. Each time I experience such a shift, I realize that my previous perspective was incredibly limited. Based on that, I’d be willing to bet that my current perspective is also limited and that, in fact, it always will be no matter how much more it expands.

Human beings tend to assume that their current perspective is accurate, that it’s THE perspective. I’ve come to see that every perspective I’ve ever had, and very likely all those I will have, are true in some sense, but also partial. Genpo Roshi is fond of saying that whatever your current perspective, that’s where you’re stuck.

Though some human beings do experience an incredibly expanded perspective, part of being human is to be limited, and part of seeing things the way they really are is to acknowledge that this is true.

Finally, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of what I share includes ideas common to Buddhism. I’m not, however, trying to show you yet another dogma, another set of ideas, that you might choose from amongst other dogmas. And, I’m certainly not trying to get you to be a Buddhist. I’m describing my own experiential understanding, limited though it may be, and I’m using terms from Buddhism because I’ve found that the great Buddhist patriarchs brilliantly described the experience I’ve had and the perspective I’ve arrived at (so far) as accurately as such things can be described.

So, with that already-too-lengthy introduction, I’d like to begin a review of several key insights about the human condition, several of which I’ve talked about in other posts but bear repeating.

First, then, let’s look at the idea of what Buddhists call the mutual interdependence of all things. One aspect of this is what a lot of people call “oneness.” This is the observation, the feeling–or, you might say, the perspective (since not everyone sees the world this way as they look around)–that everything is connected to everything else, and everything depends upon everything else.

From this perspective everything is clearly seen as one big multi-dimensional happening. Separate things and events are seen as useful ideas about reality, but with a clarity that these ideas are not reality itself. Reality, from this perspective, is one infinitely huge thing-event. Though it’s often useful to conceptually slice reality into mental “things” and mental “events,” all supposedly separate things, exist in relation to all other things, and all supposedly separate events flow out of previous events and into future events. Nothing really has any separate or individual essence. What look like separate things and events are really just ever-changing waves that make up the ocean we call the universe.

This means that no “thing” has any independent nature. It also means that you can’t describe any part of the universe without also describing its environment. In Buddhism this view is sometimes called the doctrine (or theory) of emptiness. It is also sometimes referred to as the law of cause and effect. Here’s what the Dalai Lama said about this subject in his book, The Universe in a Single Atom:

One of the most important philosophical insights in Buddhism comes from what is known as the theory of emptiness. At its heart is the deep recognition that there is a fundamental disparity between the way we perceive the world, including our own experience in it, and the way things actually are.

In our day-to-day experience, we tend to relate to the world and to ourselves as if these entities possessed self-enclosed, definable, discrete and enduring reality. For instance, if we examine our own conception of selfhood, we will find that we tend to believe in the presence of an essential core to our being, which characterizes our individuality and identity as a discrete ego, independent of the physical and mental elements that constitute our existence.

The philosophy of emptiness reveals that this is not only a fundamental error but also the basis for attachment, clinging and the development of our numerous prejudices. According to the theory of emptiness, any belief in an objective reality grounded in the assumption of intrinsic, independent existence is simply untenable. All things and events, whether ‘material’, mental or even abstract concepts like time, are devoid of objective, independent existence. To intrinsically possess such independent existence would imply that all things and events are somehow complete unto themselves and are therefore entirely self-contained. This would mean that nothing has the capacity to interact with or exert influence on any other phenomena.

But we know that there is cause and effect–turn a key in a car, the starter motor turns the engine over, spark plugs ignite and fuel begins to burn… Yet in a universe of self-contained, inherently existing things, these events could never occur!

So, effectively, the notion of intrinsic existence is incompatible with causation; this is because causation implies contingency and dependence, while anything that inherently existed would be immutable and self-enclosed. In the theory of emptiness, everything is argued as merely being composed of dependently related events; of continuously interacting phenomena with no fixed, immutable essence, which are themselves in dynamic and constantly changing relations. Thus, things and events are ‘empty’ in that they can never possess any immutable essence, intrinsic reality or absolute ‘being’ that affords independence.

Before we dive into this a little more, I want to remind you once again that I’m not suggesting this as another theory for you to adopt because it sounds good, or because someone you see as an authority has said it. Look around and confirm for yourself that everything does indeed exist in relation to everything else, that anything that happens to any part of the whole happens as a result of this relationship, and that the whole is, in fact, totally dependent on everything that is part of it.

Don’t just believe me about this–look around and confirm it for yourself. Though you might see in a flash that what I’m saying is true, you might need to investigate for months, or even years, before you see it fully. In fact, your ability to fully see how everything is related to everything else will continue to expand and probably never be complete.

This idea that nothing has an independent nature, and must exist in relation to everything else, is a very profound insight. When you really get into it, you see some very interesting implications.

First, if nothing has any independent nature, can there be a separate “you” who acts independently of the rest of the universe (other that, as with other “things”, as an idea)? It seems to most people that they are separate from the rest of the universe, and that they make decisions about what to think or do from some independent part of themselves–that they decide and act from within, independent of what goes on outside of themselves. It seems to such people that what they think or do is an independent choice.

This doctrine of emptiness, or the mutual interdependence of all things, however, implies that any decision, any action, any thought, is a response to the environment, rather than an independent choice.

Look at it this way. Living things are in many ways response mechanisms. Even the lowest viruses have ways of perceiving their environment and responding to it. They perceive food and move toward it, or perceive a lack a food and set out to find it. Higher forms of life develop more sophisticated ways of perceiving the environment, including ways to learn. Nerve ganglia remember certain stimuli and the consequences of those stimuli, and develop the ability to remember an effective response. The more sophisticated the learning mechanism and its ability to store what is learned, the wider the repertoire of responses.

In human beings, for instance, the repertoire of responses becomes huge and the ways of evaluating which response might be best become quite complex. All of these responses, however, are still just that–responses to the environment, whether spontaneously built into the organism or remembered. Because there are so many possible responses, it can seem as if we are independently choosing, but these choices are still reponses to the environment (while, at the same time, it is responding to us), just as with the simple virus.

Any way you slice it, every part of the whole is inextricably connected to, dependent upon, and responding to the rest of the whole. None of the supposedly agentic decisions are made independent from, or outside of, this connection to the whole.

I can’t resist telling you about one of Alan Watts’ quite witty descriptions of what a human being is and what it’s all about. Human beings, Watts once said, are really just tubes. Food goes in one end of the tube, and waste comes out the other end. So the tube develops different ways of finding food and getting it into the top end of the tube, which allows the tube to have enough energy to look for more food so it can continue to put it in the top end and allow waste to come out the other end. Eventually the tubes develop these nerve ganglia that help it become even better at finding food and putting it into the top end so the waste can come out the bottom end.

As the tube becomes more efficient at finding food to put in one end so waste can come out the other end (and so it has the energy to find more food to put in the top end to keep the process going), it ends up with a certan amount of free time, so it creates various ways to keep from being bored–hence literature, music, the Beverly Hillbillies, American Idol, Monster Truck shows, and other profound and significant human endeavors.

All this food going through the tube, unfortunately, wears it out after a while, so the tubes also develop a way of making other tubes, so that when the tube wears out there are other tubes who can keep up this business of putting food in one end and letting waste come out the other.

When I heard this I had to admit that he had a point, and that he had boiled down human existence to a very basic (and actually pretty funny) truth.

But back to our regularly scheduled program. What this discussion–of emptiness (of any independent nature or essence) and mutual interdependence of all things–really means is that whether or not it feels this way to you, you, as a separate entity, don’t exist. Yes, there is an organism (which is not exactly the same as what people think of as “me”, and isn’t any more separate from the whole than anything else). And, that organism chooses many of its behaviors, but all of this choosing, and which choices are available, flow directly from the immediate interactions the organism has with the rest of the whole, plus (in some cases) what it has learned from past interactions. None of its actions or choices happen in isolation.

In fact, you could turn this idea that you depend on the entire universe on its head and say that the entire universe also depends on YOU. Even before you were born, the universe depended on the fact that you would someday be here, and after you’re gone it will depend on the fact that you were here. In my own case, this is a universe that does something called Bill Harris, in the same way an apple tree produces apples, and the existence of Bill Harris (or you) can’t be separated from the whole going on of it all.

I’ve been talking off and on over many posts about the experience of emptiness, or what some call the transcendent, and a few people have posted lately saying that they’ve had such experiences, while using Holosync, while doing Big Mind with Genpo Roshi, or in some other way. In this experience, you FEEL, or experience, how everything goes together. It is obvious that everything goes together and is dependent upon everything else. So let’s look more closely at this sort of experience, and why is might happen (or not happen).

First, if everything goes together in the way I’ve described, why do most people tend to see the universe as a collection of separate things and events? In fact, seeing the world as a collection of separate things and events is so common that those who talk about emptiness, the transcendent, oneness, or whatever you want to call it, are seen as a bit nutty.

The common explanation for the experience of separateness is that the mind, by its nature, divides everything into separate things and events. This is in line with what I said earlier: these divisions are conceptual. They are mentally generated and are not intrinsic to the world. As Alan Watts used to say, a thing is a “think,” a unit of thought, as much of reality as you decide to get your mind around in any particular moment.

When we’re very small we learn the names of things and events, which gives us the impression that things and events are something concrete instead of merely conceptual (in addition to learning that a thing and it’s name are synonymous–that the “map” is the same as what it represents). This leaves us with an underlying premise that a separation exists between one thing (or event) and another in reality, not just in the mind.

Once we learn to see the world in terms of separate things and events, we learn to divide them into two categories: those that are desirable and those that are undesirable. Then the fight (what I’ve referred to as The Game of Black and White) begins. Most people spend their entire life trying to get what they (with the help of parents and society) think is desirable, and to avoid what they think is undesirable.

This fight, which happens both internally and externally, can’t happen unless we mistakenly believe in the reality of separate things and events, and unless we believe that these supposedly separate items really are in opposition. There is a deep secret (shhh!) about all things that seem to be in opposition: they are really one indivisible and interdependent unit. The two warring sides actually go together. Neither side of the conflict can exist without the other. And, ultimately, the division itself happens only in your head. 

I’ve often written about the problems created by focusing on (in other words, making internal representations of) what you don’t want. To the degree that you do this, you feel bad and you unconsciously arrange to attract or create more of it. The whole process of focusing on what you don’t want–trying to avoid one side of a supposed polarity– is rooted in the underlying premise that separate things and events are real rather than merely conceptual. Focusing on what you don’t want (along with clinging to what you do want) causes most human suffering.

The mutual interdependence of all things is also another way to refer to the process of cause and effect, or karma, but that’s a topic we’ll tackle in another post.

As I said in the beginning of this post, learning about how everything is dependent upon everything else has limited value. The real ah-ha comes not from intellectual understanding, but from really seeing and experiencing it for yourself.

This is, then, something for you to sit with in meditation and be mindful of as you go through your day. Look around and notice how you are connected to everything–in fact, that every living thing, every object, and every event is connected to and flows out of (and into) its environment. Keep noticing this and reminding yourself of this basic premise and eventually it will become obvious. Your goal is to embody this truth, so that it is with you all the time.

Next time we’ll look at another aspect of “seeing things the way they really are”.

Before I let you go, though, I want to remind you of a few upcoming events:

1) September 19-20, New York: Genpo Roshi and I will be leading another of our 2-day workshops. These events really are life-changing. I can’t emphasize enough the benefit of spending two days with us. For more information, see www.centerpointe.com/bigmind.

2) September 30-October 3, Calgary, Canada: I will be speaking with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, billionaire Richard Branson, Nobel Peace Prize-winner F.W. deKlerk, and several other world thought-leaders, business experts, and charitable activists. Many are calling this the Event of the Decade. For more information to to www.engagetoday2009.com.

3) October 24-25, Houston, Texas: Genpo Roshi and I will be leading another 2-day workshop. Again, a rare opportunity to spend time with a true Zen master, and me. For details, and to register, go to www.centerpointe.com/bigmind/houston.

I would love to see you at one–or all three–of these events.

Be well.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

When you have such an experience you also find that it’s impossible to communicate this knowingness in a way that anyone could possibly understand–unless they, too, have had the experience. When you try to communicate what you’ve realized, anything you say seems foolish and inarticulate, even before you say it. There’s just no way to capture it with ideas or words. For that reason, I’m not going to try to explain it (though I admit I’ve tried in many of these posts), because it can’t be explained–at least in a way that would actually be helpful.

Despite all of this, from this experience I did have one insight I want to share–something I already ”knew,” but now see at a deeper, more visceral, more profound level.

Emptiness is an interesting term in Buddhism. It doesn’t actually mean nothing, and it also doesn’t really mean empty in the normal sense of there being nothing there, or that it’s all empty space. Emptiness is actually an attempt to describe what I’ve already said can’t be described. It’s a kind of code-word amongst those who have had the experience.

You could, I suppose, call it “no-thing-ness,” because in this state it’s very clear that there are no separate things, that everything is interconnected and all divisions are unreal–other than in a conceptual sense. Things are units of thought, not units of reality. In this state conceptualizations seem silly, unnecessary, inconsequential, and not pertinent to what really is. You don’t want to conceptualize. It just seems like a lot of effort serving no real purpose.

Even if you’ve had such an experience many times before, this is an odd sensation. After all, for almost all people life is almost entirely conceptual. All but a few rare people live in and through their ideas about reality, their map of how it all is. That map has been taken as the real territory to such a degree that it’s all that most people see. But in the emptiness experience, all these maps and ideas just don’t seem to matter or have much importance.

When you “see how it all is” in this way, your map seems so skinny and insubstantial it’s hard to believe you built your life around it. To say that it seems partial is an understatement. It’s like mistaking a stick-figure for the real you, or a one paragraph biography for the story of your life. This realization–that pretty much everything you’ve hung your hat on for your entire life is insubstantial, partial, and largely irrelevant–is life-changing.

When you’re in touch with this emptiness (or, I should say, when you realize that you are this emptiness), you see the truth of what all the sages, Zen masters, and enlightened beings have said: there really is nowhere to go, and nothing to get. In fact, even if there were something to get, there’s no separate entity who could go anywhere to get it.

When you’re enmeshed in your map of reality, it sure doesn’t seem this way, though. Of course there’s somewhere to go, something to get, and someone to get it! Not only can I feel it, everyone else agrees with me about it. C’mon. Look around. It’s obvious that there are separate things and separate events, including a separate “me.”

All of this seems quite real when you identify with your ideas about reality–which is what all but a few human beings do. It can be quite difficult to untangle yourself from your map (or, at least, it seems to be difficult). The mind can be quite subtle in the way it tempts you to believe in your map. For instance, if you know a lot about Eastern philosophy and mysticism and such things, you might identify with your ideas about emptiness and no-thing-ness, all the while thinking that you “get it.”

In thinking about this experience, I realized how much of life is about getting somewhere and getting something. Wherever we are, we’re dissatisfied. If we are satisfied, it’s momentary, and then we’re off after something else. Wherever we are, we think we’d be better off if only we were somewhere else. And whatever we have, we want (or think we need) something else or something more. Whatever our material, mental, or spiritual situation–we never feel like we’re quite “there.”

This is how it feels when we’re under the spell of our mind and think and feel that we’re a separate entity confronted by lots of other separate things and entities (who don’t care about us or have our best interests at heart). We feel, as the poet A. E. Housman said, “Alone and afraid, in a world I never made.”

If, on the other hand, you really, really, really got that there’s just One Thing, and you’re it–not intellectually, but experientially, in your bones–where would you need to go? Where could you go? And what would you get if you went there?

We have this underlying sensation, then, that there’s something we don’t have, and if we could just get it, then we could rest, then we’d be okay, then things would make sense. (Then there’s the other side of that coin, that there’s something terrible that had better not happen, and which in relation to we feel reasonably okay–but that’s another story for another time.)

When you were a baby, life was all about eating, sleeping, and pooping. But once you could walk and talk, then you were getting somewhere. But being a toddler wasn’t enough. You wanted to get to kindergarten, then first grade. You want to learn to read. It’s coming, that something, and when you get it, well, then things will be great. Keep going. Maybe when you’re bigger.

Maybe it will come in junior high school. But when you get there you want to be in high school. Well, maybe it’ll happen when you have sex, or make the football team. Or, maybe, it’ll come when you’re in college, or when you get married, or have children, or get your PhD. Maybe you’ll get it once you get a job, establish a career, accumulate some money. Climb the success ladder, and then maybe you’ll get it. Maybe it will come once you have children, or when the children are gone, or when you retire.

And so on.

Somewhere along the line a few people begin to suspect that it (whatever it is), might not come from worldly accomplishments, so they turn their attention to spiritual development. Getting it shifts to “if I meditate long enough,” “if I find the right teacher,” “if I read enough spiritual books,” “if I say my mantra for enough years,” “if I finish koan study,” “if I experience grace,” “if I please God,” “if I get rid of desires,” “if I study the Bible,” “if I read all Ken Wilber’s books,” and so on. In some spiritual approaches you actually have to die (physically, not metaphorically) before you get the goodie you’re after. Or, you might have to experience thousands, or even millions, of lifetimes before you get it.

Does this remind you of a donkey trotting after a carrot?

Whether you’re searching in the realms of worldly or spiritual achievement, there’s always something more to get. And, whatever you do get, it’s never quite it. It’s like taking a journey to the horizon. No matter how fast you go, no matter for how long you travel, you never get there. The it you’re looking for is like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but the darned rainbow keeps moving.

All this seeking puts you in a double bind. Why? Because you’re trying to get something–whatever that indefinable something is–that you actually already have (or, to be more accurate, which you already are). When you look at it this way, you begin to see all the spiritual books and scriptures, the seminars, the meditation techniques, and all the teachers and gurus in a different light. 

Pretend for a moment that you’re a fish. You’re swimming along minding your own business when I come along and tell you that there’s this amazing stuff called water. It’s the ultimate stuff, I tell you, and if you can find it all your problems will be solved. Come to my weekend seminar ($995) and I’ll teach you what you need to know. I have it–the Ancient Secrets of Water–and you don’t. Luckily for you, I’m willing to reveal these sacred secrets to a few lucky fish like you.

Whatever you get from my seminar, though, won’t be quite enough, so you’ll have to come to my advanced seminar ($1995). You’ll be much better off after that (at least you’ll think I’m wonderful, because I’ve obviously got it). You may need, however, to study with me individually for a while. This, of course, is more expensive (but worth it). After all, you do want the Secrets of Water, don’t you?

All the while, you’re swimming in it, and you always have been.

Now, I’m not saying that all seminars are bullshit, or that all teachers are conning you. After all, I make my living as a teacher, and I think what I offer is pretty valuable. Some seminars and teachers, thankfully, are doing their best to say (as I am), “Look, you already have it. In fact, you’re it.”

Ironically, as long as you’re thinking, “If I just do more Holosync, if I just do more Big Mind, if I just spend more time with Baba Suchabanana, if I just become a Zen monk, if I read more spiritual books, if I just could get rid of desire, if I could finish all of Ken Wilber’s books, if I could just get rid of negativity,” you won’t see that you’re already it. As long as the fish is searching like crazy for the water, he’ll fail to see that his entire world is water. It’s like those times when you can’t find your keys, and all the while they’re in your hand.

This search for what you already are, then, is a double bind, an insoluble problem, a wild goose chase. It’s like trying to bite your teeth with your teeth, or touch the end of your finger with the end of the same finger. No matter what you do to get it, you’re never quite there.

This is one of the main reasons why life is so filled with frustration. We’re all busy trying to get the un-gettable (or, rather, what we already have). We’re not even quite sure what it is, but we have this nagging feeling that something is missing. Wherever we are, it isn’t quite the right place. Whatever we have isn’t quite the right thing to have. Whoever we are isn’t the right “me.”

An authentic teacher–one who really knows that it’s all “nothingness” and therefore has seen through the double bind–will take an interesting approach to helping you. On the premise that “a fool who persists in his folly will become wise,” he’ll try to get you to act consistently with your delusion. He’ll put you in a microcosm of the double bind I’ve described, hoping that after some intense, disciplined, and incredibly frustrating seeking, you might begin to doubt the whole enterprise and give it up.

A teacher might, for instance, tell you that the source of your chronic frustration is that you desire. The Buddha said that desire (clinging, thirsting) creates suffering. Stop desiring and you’ll be fine. Ah, that’s the secret! So, you set out to get rid of your desires, and periodically you meet with the teacher so he can check on your progress. As time passes you seem to be able to get rid of a few desires, but others seem quite stubborn. “This is harder than I thought,” you say.

Then the teacher really throws you a curve. “Isn’t your attempt to get rid of desire just another desire? What are you going to do about that?” Oops. Now what? “Hmm. I guess I’ll have to stop desiring to get rid of desire.” But how do you do that? The teacher has put you in a double bind and no matter what you do there’s no escape.

Or, he might ask you, in one of many different ways, to be totally spontaneous, to not act from any of your ideas or concepts. So, you work on that. But how can you be intentionally spontaneous? Another double bind.

And, if you do get it, the teacher will tell you what a wonderful start you’ve made, but there’s more. Keep going. He’ll keep jollying you along as long as he can, until you’re tied up in knots.

These double binds are, as I said earlier, the double bind of life in microcosm. The double bind, along with the authority of the teacher (he seems to have it), your intense desire and commitment to get it, can create incredible frustration and doubt. This frustration and doubt is designed to drive you to the point where you give up, where you see through the whole thing.

This Great Doubt, as it’s called in Zen, throws you into the transcendent, into the experience of emptiness, and from that place, you suddenly see how ridiculous the whole endeavor was. You, the fish, see that it’s all water, and what in the hell were you searching for all that time?

Or, the whole thing drives you completely out of your mind.

But let’s look at the other side of the coin, because while all of the above is true–there really is nothing to get and nowhere to go, and none of your getting or going is going to save you or solve the basic problem of life (that we suffer). As long as you’re here, you have to go somewhere and try to get something. You have to play the game. If you don’t, life has no juice, no pizzazz.

You can only rest in emptiness (or Oneness, or whatever you want to call it) for so long. After a while, the relative world comes along and bites you in the ass. Everything may indeed be one all-encompassing and interconnected thing/process, and who you are may certain be that process, but that doesn’t mean the relative world isn’t here.

As that one thing/process manifests as the entire natural universe, it obeys the laws of cause and effect. And, as I said at length in a previous post, there is no escape from that. What’s more, there’s also no escape from the fact that everything in the relative universe is impermanent and eventually passes away or falls apart.

Eastern philosophy has a wonderful metaphor to describe the fact that while you’re it you’re also subject to impermanence and cause and effect: the one energy of everything is playing Hide and Seek with itself. You’re it, but you pretend to not know that you’re it. You hide who you really are from yourself, and then you look for it. What fun.

At first, though, you look for it in the form of worldly pleasures, status, power, and all the other things you think will satisfy you. As you probably know, none of them, at least in any ultimate sense, can satisfy you. When you do get what you want, it only satisfies you for a short while, and then you need something else. You get a new car and for a while it’s all very exiting and satisfying, but within a month or so it’s just transportation. You have one Pringle, but then you want another.

What’s more, whatever you get is eventually used up or falls apart. No matter what you do, eventually impermanence wins.

If somehow you could scratch your itch to find satisfaction in every possible way, until you totally run out of things to try, you might see through it all and realize that nothing will ever give you any real and lasting satisfaction, salvation, or relief. This would be the equivalent of trying in every possible way to get rid of desire, until you were completely stymied.

The great spiritual masters, down through the centuries, have found that this experience of coming to the end of your rope, this experience of Great Doubt, can lead to an experience of awakening, of emptiness, of seeing that you already are what you’ve been seeking–and that all along there was nowhere to go, nothing to get, and nothing to realize.

The Zen master who asks you to get rid of desire, or to show your original face (or one of many other double-bind problems he might give you) is giving you a short cut, because he knows you’ll never be able to try every way of (hopefully) gaining lasting salvation or satisfaction.

So here you are. Perhaps you know who you are. Perhaps you just believe me and the others who may have told you who you are, but it’s intellectual rather than experiential. Knowing intellectually, I’m afraid, isn’t going to help. It might be a good start, but to really know who you are, it must be experienced. As long as it’s merely something you believe, it’s just another “something” to chase after. If so, once again, you’re chasing your own tail, because you’re already it.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you really do know who you are. You know that you are the emptiness the Buddhists speak about, and you know it experientially. You might want to just hang out in that emptiness place, and for a while you probably will. It’s a great place to hang out. But, as I said, the relative world will eventually intrude on your reverie. The organism though which this Oneness is being experienced is still subject to impermanence and cause and effect, and sooner or later you’re going to have to deal with that.

Knowing who you really are makes this a lot easier, though. If you were an actor playing Hamlet, but somehow forgot that you were an actor, and thought you really were Hamlet, it would be a tragedy, because everyone dies in the end. If, however, you knew it was just a play, and that after the curtain fell you’d all go back to the green room, take off your makeup and your costumes, and go out and have a beer together, you’d have a great time playing at being Hamlet.

So after the experience of emptiness (there could be many, each one deeper than the last), the next step is to integrate this knowingness of who you really are with the reality of the relative world. In part, this means acting as if there really is somewhere to go and something to get, while in the back of your mind you know it doesn’t matter. You pretend like crazy, though, that it does matter, and you do this because this is what makes life worth living. And, anyway, what else would you do?

What’s different is that from this integrated place you have choice. Instead of unconsciously careening from one object of desire to another, from one place you think you should be to another, from one “me” you want to be to another, you consciously choose what to want, where to go, and who to be, knowing the consequences and consciously deciding to accept them. You know that whatever you become attached to eventually will be used up, fall apart, or end, but you decide to become attached anyway. This frees you to love the people and things in your life–but to do so with awareness.

Zen student and British-born Japanese scholar R.H. Blyth once wrote to Alan Watts, saying, “How are you, Alan? As for me, I’ve given up all thoughts of satori and enlightenment and am busy becoming attached to as many people and things as possible.” This is an expression of this idea of becoming attached, not unconsciously, but with awareness and choice.

So in your game of Hide and Seek, once you find what you were looking for (yourself), you keep playing, but now your playing is more relaxed. Instead of trying hard you “try soft,” because you know that although cause and effect and impermanence are real, they’re just the play of that one that one all-encompassing “it” and though it won’t always appear as what you think of as “me,” it will always appear as something, and that something is who you really are.

*******

Before I let you go I have a very important announcement–what some people are calling the biggest personal and spiritual growth event of the first decade of the new millennium. On August 29th and 30th, Ken Wilber, Zen master Genpo Roshi, Zen master Bernie Glassman Roshi, and I will present Enlightenment and the Western Mind in Westminster, Colorado (in the Denver area). This will be a highly interactive, free-wheeling event–one I suspect will never happen again, ever.

As you know if you’ve been following this blog for long, for the last several years I’ve been fortunate to know and work with the great author, philosopher, and spiritual teacher Ken Wilber, and to have an even closer relationship with the great Zen master Genpo Roshi. I’ve also done everything possible to share these great teachers with those who use Holosync and are involved with Centerpointe. I’ve had huge positive growth in my own life as a result of these relationships, and I want you to experience the same thing.

This is your chance to sit at the feet and learn from two Zen masters, and Ken Wilber (and me, too). We’ll be talking about the development of Western Spirituality, and where it might go from here, but I suspect this weekend will cover MUCH more. In fact, I’m quite sure that this weekend will profoundly deepen your experience and understanding of who you are, what life is about, and how to live with true inner peace, happiness, compassion, and success.

I’m convinced, in fact, that this is going to be a truly historic event. Many people are calling it the key spiritual event of the first decade of the 21st century. If I were you, I would do whatever you have to do to be there. It took an event of this magnitude to tempt Ken Wilber, who is in poor health, into making a rare public appearance. None of us are really sure when Ken might stop appearing in public altogether.

To see Ken, along with Genpo Roshi, Bernie Roshi (Genpo’s dharma brother, known for his deep understanding, his skill as a teacher, and his compassionate service in the world), and me, together in the same event, is something that will probably never happen again.

Besides, I really want you to meet Ken, Genpo Roshi, and Bernie Roshi–and, if I haven’t met you in person, I want to meet you, too.

The cost for this special event is $1295, but you can save $300 if you sign up by July 21st. Quite frankly, I’m pretty sure this is going to sell out, and quickly, so if you want to be there, grab your spot right away. Just go to www.vastsky.org and click on “register now” on the right, or call 801 328 8414. I look forward to seeing you at what I’m sure will be the experience of a lifetime.

So, until next time, be well.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Here’s the question, and then my (expanded) response.

Hi Bill,

I’m convinced that watching with awareness will integrate any shadow material, but I don’t understand why Ken Wilber in his many books is stating otherwise. Terry Patten, Adam Leonard and Marco Morelli wrote in Integral Life Practice [a book recently published by Integral Institute]: “If I meditate, and meditate very deeply, what can happen? I can watch my fear and sadness arise as objects in my awareness. I can relax my ‘identification’ with them. (…) But unless I do shadow work in addition to meditating, I probably won’t truly face my shadow.”

In one of the editions of Mind Chatter [Centerpointe's now-defunct newsletter/magazine, which was replaced by this blog--hence the name, The Blog that Ate Mind Chatter] you said that you were going to ask Ken about Shadow work versus Watching with awareness, aka witnessing. You wrote that your own experience and many others showed that witnessing can resolve shadow material.

Have you ever asked that question to Ken. If you did, what was the answer? If you didn’t, will you ask it? I’m just curious about this topic. I know that shadow work can be useful, but the method you are proposing is a lot faster, easier and more effective than 3-2-1 process [a process taught by Integral Institute for re-owning shadow material] or any other type of therapy.

This is a great question. Here’s how I see it. [If you aren't clear on what a "shadow" is, you might want to read my previous post, "What's Hiding in Your Shadows".]

When the people at Integral say that you can meditate forever and not deal with your shadow material, I think they are right. You can meditate for years, even decades, and not deal with your shadows, and many people do. That’s because there’s more to dealing with shadow material than just observing your feelings during meditation and “relaxing your identification with them”.

This is a bit of a detour, but I think this idea of “relaxing your identification” with your feelings is a mis-statement of what actually happens in meditation. It assumes a separate self that feels something and then identifies (or dis-identifies) with it. What hopefully happens in meditation is the realization that while feelings happen, there is no feeler–no separate “you” who then feels something. Feelings happen, but a separate feeler is not necessary and does not exist (contrary to what nearly everyone takes to be common sense).

What we take to be the feeler is, in fact, just another feeling, a ghost in the system (you could also say that what you identify as the “thinker”–i.e., “you”–is just another one of the thoughts). I know this seems like a weird idea, but sit with it and see what happens. Look for the thinker or the feeler (or the walker or the talker or any kind of doer) and see what you find.

Here’s another example, one that doesn’t involve the question of a separate “you”, but illustrates the same point: it’s inaccurate to say that there’s something called “lightning” which then does something–it flashes. The lightning IS the flashing, and the flashing IS is lightning. There’s just flashing, but no need for a flasher, a separate something that does the flashing. 

Requiring that every action (every verb) include something that does the action (a noun) may be a grammatical rule and a social convention, but it isn’t what happens in reality, and it’s the essence of an unreal and unnatural duality.

The doer is nothing more than an idea. All supposed “things” are actually actions, events. A cat is “catting”, a table is “tabling”, a tree is “treeing”. Action does not require an actor, and assuming that an actor exists ultimately creates the (seeming) duality that keeps people in anxiety about life (but that’s another story we won’t go into here, but which I have written about in other posts).

What’s missing from this Integral Institute description is the fact that those feelings (or, other consequences, such as actions taken, results created, etc.) are generated by something inside the organism (its internal cognitive processes–or, you might say, the “respond-ability”–of the organism). Feelings are a response the organism’s nervous system has to stimuli from the environment, and they happen without the need of a separate self who “has” these feelings.

The feelings, however, aren’t the problem. The problem is the illusion of a separate self. Since the feelings aren’t the problem, dis-identifying with them isn’t the solution. If there is no separate self (which there isn’t, even though almost everyone operates as if there were), who would dis-identify with them? Perhaps it feels as if there is a dis-identification in the early stages of meditation, before the separate self is seen as an illusion. Such a person is still under the delusion that there is a separate self that now “feels less identified” with the feelings or thoughts.

In fact, dis-identification with these feelings might even contribute to making them into shadows. Dis-identification causes us to say, ”This isn’t coming from me.” It makes you think the feelings must come from outside of you, when they actually come from you (not the separate-self “you”, but rather the responses of the organism you associate with “you”). 

But I’ve gone far astray in order to make sure you get that the people who wrote the Integral Life Practices book are speaking as if there is a self who can “identify” with feelings. So let’s get back to the real question of whether Holosync will allow you to deal with and resolve shadow material (otherwise, who knows where we’ll end up!).

I think the point the Integral folks are making is that what they are calling dis-identification with your feelings (and what I would rather call a realization that there is no separate self) isn’t going to resolve your shadow stuff. In fact, even if you had the spiritual insight that there is no separate self–even if it becomes luminously clear that doing, feeling, thinking, etc. do not require a doer, feeler, or thinker–the shadow stuff would remain. An organism’s ”doing” is a learned response, programmed into its nervous system. Something happens, and the organism responds in a certain way. For instance, another person acts in an angry way, and you become afraid.

To continue with that same example, that pre-programmed response might include being triggered by angry people (which happens if you’ve disowned your own anger). It would also include expressing anger in covert and dysfunctional ways, which also happens when you have disowned anger. If this is the case, it won’t matter if you are “dis-identified” with the anger, or even if you’re firmly established in a no-self point of view. The shadow response is programmed into the organism’s nervous system. It’s just as automatic as moths being drawn to a porch light.

There is another way for a nervous system to operate, however. Responding in pre-programmed ways has its advantages, because you don’t have to re-think each event you experience. Disowning anger (or any other human quality) has its benefits. If anger is disowned, it probably was the best response the organism could come up with in order to deal with the anger of others during childhood.

There is, however, a largely untapped talent humans have where responses are not automatic. When this talent is developed, the person responds spontaneously and intuitively in each moment, perhaps drawing on pre-programmed responses if they are appropriate, but exercising choice rather than just responding automatically. Instead, the person responds from a wider pallet of choices that come out of the needs of the moment.

This talent, if you want to call it that, depends on awareness.

If you’re aware enough to see, for instance, that your internal representations (your internal pictures and internal dialog) directly create your feelings, as they happen, you’ll see that 1) some of the feelings created don’t serve you, and 2) that you have choice about the internal representations that generate the feelings (awareness creates choice–without awareness, internal processes operate automatically).

Usually these “creative” internal representations happen automatically, outside your awareness. If so, they create a pre-programmed response, as I described above. You can, however, become aware of the process by which these responses are created. Once you do, your responses stop happening in a pre-programmed and automatic way. They become a choice.

So it’s the awareness that internal representations (along with a few other internal processes) generate certain responses–and their consequences–that creates the shift. If you have a shadow–an aspect of yourself which you’ve disowned and projected outside of yourself, onto others–and you merely experience the feeling of it during meditation (with or without “detachment” or a no-self perspective), it isn’t going to shift anything. The automatic response will continue to happen whenever it is triggered.

That’s because there’s nothing about experiencing the feeling that causes you to realize that it was created in your own mind. You could still assume (as people do all the time with feelings) that the feeling was caused by external events. If the point of choice (which internal representations are made) is outside of your awareness, you’ll naturally assign another “cause” to the feelings. Or, you might assume that feelings “just happen,” without a specific cause.

If, then, as I said above, you dis-identify with those feelings (as the authors of the Integral Life Practice book describe it), it makes matters worse. Dis-identifying (or a no-self perspective, for that matter) certainly isn’t going to cause you to get that the feelings are being generated by your own internal processes.

However, when you become aware enough to see that what you do in your mind generates how you feel (which also includes the realization that the environment is the trigger, but not the cause), it becomes clear that you’re doing it, that what you feel comes from your nervous system’s pre-programmed responses rather than from something ”out there”. 

Or you could say that you see that what internal representations are made in response to a certain trigger (i.e., experience) is a choice, and the pre-programmed response isn’t the only choice. This realization requires that you own the feeling (i.e., acknowledge that it comes from something in your nervous system), which dissolves the shadow.

Remember that “disowned” really means “it doesn’t come from me–it’s out there. It isn’t my anger, my selfishness (or whatever), it’s that other person’s.” Owning something means that you SEE (in other words, are aware of) that it’s coming from you. Seeing this creates choice. And, it’s important to realize that this doesn’t mean merely knowing that you create it, but rather seeing how you do it, as it happens.

With even more awareness, you also see the potential consequences being created, and that these consequences originate from something you do.

This is why, if you’re aware, you have choice–because the feeling being created originates in something YOU DO. Or, you could say, to the degree you are aware, to that degree you have choice. If you’re aware of what you’re doing, and how you’re doing it (what you’re doing inside to create it), while you do it, you have choice about it (which, with even more awareness, includes seeing the potential consequences).

The consequences of disowning a human quality include 1) being constantly triggered by it when you see it in others, 2) attracting people who exhibit the disowned quality so that the world seems to be full of that type of person, and 3) expressing the disowned quality yourself (though you don’t see that you’re doing so) in covert and dysfunctional ways.

In clearly seeing that the response is coming from something in you and not from something outside of you, and in clearly seeing the consequences, it becomes difficult keep doing it when the consequences aren’t resourceful. In that case, the shadow is re-owned and the automatic responses it was generating becomes difficult or even impossible to continue doing.

I want to add another wrinkle, though, for the sake of completeness. A major point of my last two posts is that despite the fact that you potentially have all this choice (if you’re aware enough to exercise it–a big assumption), and despite the fact that this choice gives you much more power and control over your life, there are still two things that you can’t escape from: the impermanence of all things and events, and the fact that you are caught in a huge web of cause and effect, most of which you have no control over.

The consequences affecting you from all the events in the physical world (galaxies, stars, the sun, the earth, gravity, cosmic rays, the weather, that rocks are hard, what your body needs to stay alive, etc., etc.), and from the actions of all the other people who have a different agenda than yours, are like “cause and effect bullets” wizzing around you. When you’re aware enough, you avoid many of these bullets because you’re more likely to be aware of them and step out of the way.

The more aware you are, the more you see this huge web of cause and effect and how it might affect you. In doing so, you have more choice. You avoid involvement with certain bullets–for instance, unpleasant people and situations, bad investments, risky situations, and so forth–that you might otherwise, with less awareness of the potential consequences, get involved with. 

A shadow represents a lack of awareness. When you have a shadow, you unconsciously attract certain difficult people and difficult situations, and you act in ways that create negative consequences. Being unaware, you don’t see yourself doing this, so you keep doing it. As certain consequences happen, you place responsibility for them outside of yourself. See this process (and your part in it) with awareness, however, and the shadow is re-owned, the consequences seen, and what happens in your life changes for the better. You avoid the bullets previously generated by that particular shadow.

The more aware you are, the more of this suffering you avoid, but there’s no way to avoid all suffering (other than dying, I suppose). First, there are just too many bullets for anyone to avoid them all. With enough awareness, though, you can avoid a lot of them. Even though the choice created by increased awareness only affects a small percentage of the “cause and effect bullets,” it’s enough to dramatically improve your life.

Second, there’s no way to avoid the fact that everything in this universe is impermanent. Everything, no matter what it is, eventually falls apart. You can surrender to impermanence, and in doing so end the suffering created by your resistance to it, but you’ll never get rid of impermanence itself.

If you come to terms with these two, you become a master of your life. Few people do this, however, because there’s a price to pay to have this kind of awareness, and most people aren’t willing to pay it (by using Holosync, though, you are paying a large part of it). This “coming to terms with what is”, by the way, is the point behind the first of my 9 Principles for Conscious Living, Let Whatever Happens Be Okay.

I respect Ken Wilber’s opinion that meditation does not help a person deal with shadow material. I’ve seen many long-time meditators who are still screwed up emotionally and have lots of shadow material. At the same time, I’ve personally known thousands of Holosync users who clearly have resolved all kinds of shadow material.

Over the last 24 years, many Holosync meditators have become aware of how they create their feelings, their behaviors, which people and situations they attract or become attracted to, and what meanings they place on what’s going on around them. As you gain this awareness, you stop creating what does not serve you–which includes disowning certain aspects of being human, which is what shadows are.

My friend John Dupuy, who has applied Ken’s Integral theory to addiction recovery, and has made Holosync the cornerstone of his approach to drug and alcohol recovery, tells me that he has observed the same phenomenon: nearly all the addicts he treats who use Holosync seem to shed emotional problems in a way non-Holosync clients don’t.

Another good friend, psychologist Dr. Beverlee Marks Taub (who, by the way, has  been using Holosync since the very beginning, way back in 1985) works with many Holosync users in her therapy and coaching practice. She has been telling me for years that Holosync users move through their “stuff”, including their shadows, far more quickly than non-Holosync users.

There is considerable evidence that the awareness Holosync creates dramatically accelerates the process of seeing how you create your life.

Shadows are the result of a lack of awareness. They cause you to inadvertently step in front of the bullets I referred to above. When you disown a human quality (making it a shadow) you are, by definition, unaware of it. You’ve pushed it out of your awareness because being aware of it feels painful to you. Someone in your childhood taught you (usually through positive and negative reinforcement) that it’s something bad or wrong. They made it painful for you, so you disowned it.

When that shadow, that human characteristic, does intrude into your awareness, you respond to what seems like an emergency by making it seem as if it’s coming from someone or something else, something outside of you–rather than seeing or admitting that it’s actually a part of you. It isn’t your anger, your selfishness, your weakness (or whatever). It’s someone else’s anger, selfishness, or weakness that bothers you.

So you can see that if you begin to become aware of how your feelings, all your ideas, all your premises about life and reality, all your behaviors, and how you become attracted to certain people or situations, all originate in your own mind, it becomes increasingly more difficult to disown something, to project it out onto someone or something outside of you.

For whatever reason, Holosync seems to create that awareness in a way that traditional meditation does not. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s just a matter of degree. Perhaps traditional meditation just doesn’t create quite enough awareness, or perhaps you just have to do it much longer to get the same result.

It could also be that the shadow recognition we see in Holosync users is at least partly the result of all the information we share with you, including the information on this blog. Whether we look at the entire population of Holosync users or the entire population of, say, Zen practitioners, we see some people who are aware of their shadows (or, we might say, are in the process of becoming aware of them, since no one seems to be aware of all of them), and many who aren’t.

When I look at Zen master Genpo Roshi, who I know quite well at this point, I see someone with a great deal of awareness of his shadows, and who works on re-owning them as fast as he can become aware of them. I like to think that I’m doing the same–my relationship with him has had helped me to become much better at doing so. I also see plenty of people in the Zen world, as well as in the Holosync world, who have lots of shadow material and seem to be relatively unaware of it. Is this just a matter of how much Zen training, or how much Holosync training, a person has? Is it a matter of how much additional outside-of-actual-meditation training a person has? I’m sure we’ll learn more as time goes by.

All I can say is that Holosync users seem to own shadow material much more easily than non-Holosync users, and with much less outside feedback, than those who use traditional meditation only. If you’re not yet using Holosync, what are you waiting for?

***

Finally, before you go, I’d like you invite you to spend the weekend with with Zen master Genpo Roshi and me in Vancouver, British Columbia, on June 27th and 28th. This will be the sixth in our series of Big Mind workshops we’ve been doing for the past two years. No public event I’ve ever done has received the raves Genpo and I get for these workshops, and nothing I could say could fully convey the huge benefit you’ll receive by spending this time with a true Zen master (and me!).

I truly can’t think of anything I’ve done over the last 30 years (other than Holosync) that rivals the experience Genpo Roshi and I have created for you in this two-day event.

Just to give you an idea of what might happen for you when you attend, here are a few of the many comments we’ve received from others:

“Hi Bill, I was one of the 220 participants in the two day workshop of Big Mind/Big Heart. I can attest that all you say is true. It is a mind blowing experience, and like the gift that keeps on giving–days after I am still basking in the glow.” –April

“I have been in the audience of many wonderful teachers, but nothing in my experience compares with this last weekend. I had no expectations really (except my usual nagging feelings of self doubt i.e., I won’t be able to get this). I must admit that my mind is still trying to figure out what took place. It’s still hard for me to put into words, but I can say the experience and clarity is beyond any doubt. I must truly say that this is THE most extraordinary experience of my life so far.” –Richard

“For someone who lives in their emotions, this may seem phony at first. But actually, it is quite liberating. It freed up a lot of stuff for me, just to see that it was possible to live in a different way. Would we attend another conference? Absolutely. Why? Because it’s a great thing to participate in the group dynamic, Genpo Roshi, Bill Harris. Did anyone mention that Bill and Genpo are funny together? They can almost go on the road with a standup routine.” –Sandy

“I knew very little about Zen or Genpo Roshi; signed up intuitively. I’ve been meditating, attending growth seminars, workshops, studying, seeking, for 40+ years and most recently Holosync-ing, which I Love! AND I was completely amazed to be in Big Mind, experiencing the Transcendent State, feeling Bliss and One With Everything completely out of the ego state within the first 5 or 10 minutes of Genpo’s process. Exhilarating! Such an elegant, simple process, masterfully facilitated by Genpo Roshi and also Bill. At the end of the 1st day I realized a lifetime of shame and shallow breathing had been released. My body still feels very light and fully breathed, effortlessly, with an added measure of Happiness, Joy; Far less grasping at what I thought was ‘Reality’. –Jani

I’ve emphasized awareness a lot in recent posts. These workshops are one of the fastest and most powerful ways to increase your awareness I’ve ever seen. You’ll not only experience the transcendent, the state of Oneness everyone talks about, you’ll also leave behind several shadows that (trust me) have been causing suffering for you for years. So please come and be with us. It will transform you.

And, this is my chance to meet you in person and get to know you. As you’ll see, both Genpo and I are very approachable and available to you during this weekend. Do come up and introduce yourself so I can get to know you.

To learn more, and to register while there still are seats available, just go to www.centerpointe.com/bigmind. Because of the tough economy we’ve reduced the cost significantly, so this is the time to attend a Big Mind workshop.

And, if you’ve never been to Vancouver, it’s one of the most incredibly beautiful cities in the world, especially in June. See you there!

Be well.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

There are certain problems you can’t do anything about. There’s no way to change the fact that everything in this world is impermanent and will eventually come to an end or fall apart. You also can’t escape from the web of cause and effect that you’re a part of. The solution, if you want to call it that, is to stop making these things into problems. In other words, stop resisting what cannot be resisted.

You can, however, avoid or minimize some of the problems of life, and awareness is the key to doing this. If you’re aware, you can exercise choice regarding the way you enter into and engage the world of cause and effect. Though you can’t control everything raining down on you from the world of cause and effect, you can exercise enough control to substantially improve your life.

There are two ways to approach life: you can live automatically, on autopilot, or consciously, with awareness. Unfortunately, nearly all people live with little awareness, on autopilot. What’s more, if you’re living on autopilot, you won’t even know you’re on autopilot, unless someone tells you. That’s why they call it autopilot.

Identifying the areas where you’re operating unconsciously is one of the benefits of having a teacher. The teacher is like a mirror, showing you what you can’t see for yourself, about yourself. Even a teacher needs a teacher.

Of course, whether you live on autopilot or with awareness isn’t an either/or proposition. There’s a huge spectrum of possibilities between living unconsciously and living with awareness, and each person is somewhere between these two–hopefully developing toward greater awareness. I described this developmental process in detail in the first dozen or so posts on this blog. You might consider reading those posts if you haven’t already done so. They are important, and it’s fascinating information.

The process of becoming more aware can continue to almost infinite levels–or it can stop somewhere along the way. The process pauses periodically to allow you to integrate the latest bit of awareness you’ve gained. Each new gain in awareness changes your perception of reality, and of who you are, and this new perspective takes some getting used to (think of a child going off to school for the first time, or when you went off to college).

Whatever amount of awareness you have, you use it to navigate your life. As long as you can navigate with a reasonable amount of success with the awareness you already have, and as long as your environment remains relatively stable (in other words, doesn’t make any out-of-the-ordinary demands on you that require you to become more aware), you’ll likely stay at your current level of awareness.

As long as what you’re doing works, you’ll keep doing it.

If something significant changes, however, your awareness might need to expand in a way that allows you to deal with the change. If it doesn’t, you’ll be handicapped in certain ways. Most mental and emotional dysfunctions are the result of incomplete developmental shifts.

Some people purposely seek change and put themselves in situations that require an ongoing expansion of awareness. They continually try new things. They take in new ideas. They read. They take classes and seminars. They meditate. They spend time with new and different people. They put themselves in challenging and novel situations. All these things can stimulate the development of additional awareness.

On the other hand, some people do everything they can to limit the amount of change they experience, or the amount of new information or novel experiences they have. For these people (in fact, for most people), development levels off at a certain point–unless something beyond their control causes a significant change to their environment.

As awareness expands, you see more. You watch, you might say, from a higher spot on the mountain. Your perspective grows. For instance, you take into account a longer span of time as you look at life. When you’re young, you’re more in the moment, but as awareness expands you gain a longer-term view. You plan more and delay gratification. You’re more likely to see the effects of the past on your life, and how what you do now will affect the future. Ultimately you might come to see your place in the ongoing flow of life in terms of, and from the perspective of, eons of time–or even infinite time.

As awareness expands you gain the ability to take increasingly larger, broader perspectives. At first, you may see only your own perspective, not even realizing that other people even have a different perspective. As your awareness expands, though, you begin to see the perspectives of others, first of those in your own family, then your peer group, then the perspective of other groups (”them”).

If you continue to develop (a big “if”), your perspective eventually takes in that of all people, then expands further to include all living things. It might eventually expand beyond that of living things. It might even expand beyond the perspective of a limited separate self looking out on a separate world and separate others.

As awareness expands, you more clearly see the web of cause and effect, how it affects you, and how you affect it. You see, for instance, the potential stream of effects that flow from the thoughts and other internal representations you make, from your actions, from what you believe, and from previously unexamined basic premises about reality.

You also see a similar flow of effects from others, and from events originating in the non-living world. You may see that what you thought was solid reality is just an effect that begins with certain premises you always thought were solidly true, but actually aren’t.

To see all of this, though, you have to learn how to observe certain things that most people are unaware of. Much of my teaching is about how to gain (and direct) this awareness. I’ve often said that I do two things: I offer a tool that dramatically expands awareness (Holosync), and then show you where to direct that awareness to give you the greatest amount of control over your life.

An infant first becomes aware of his own existence as something or someone separate from the rest of the world. He then becomes aware of his body and it’s movements and sensory experiences. Eventually he becomes aware of his emotions, and then, hopefully, his thoughts and beliefs.

In many ways, however, the amount of awareness most people have of these basics is just the tip of the iceberg. Most people are aware that they have thoughts and emotions, but only consciously experience them now and then. It is extremely rare for a human being to be aware of how he creates his feelings, or of the effects of his thoughts.

It is even more rare for a person to be aware of the premises that underlie the reality he creates in each moment (or even that he is creating such a reality). Even fewer people see how their thoughts, actions, and basic premises affect the ongoing flow of cause and effect, and the complexity of how cause and effect affects them.

Why are your thoughts, internal representations, actions, beliefs, and premises so important? Because these things generate nearly all of your experience of life. Your internal cognitive processes, and particularly your internal representations and beliefs, create how you feel, how you behave, which people and situations you attract or become attracted to, and what the things going on ”out there” mean (or at least what you think they mean).

These four outcomes make up most, if not all, of your experience of life. If you can become aware of how you create them, you gain a tremendous amount of choice over what happens in your life. Why? Because awareness creates choice.

If you’re not aware of how you create your life, you’ll do it automatically. The part of you that creates your experience of life operates continuously, whether you’re aware of it or not. If you’re unaware, it will create your life on autopilot, and you’ll get whatever you’ve been programmed (mostly during your childhood) to create.

In other words, your past will determine your present, for better or worse.

For this reason, it’s very important that you become aware of the ongoing stream of internal pictures you make and the thoughts you think–and the effects they create. Ninety-nine percent of this happens outside your awareness, but it’s the raw material that creates your experience of life.

If you watch carefully enough, you’ll see exactly how these usually unconscious events generate your feelings and other internal states. If you aren’t willing to learn how to watch this stuff, though–and all of it continues to happen automatically (as it does for all but a tiny percentage of people)–your feelings will continue to “just happen”.

Then, because your internal states generate your behavior, your awareness of (and choice over) how you create your internal states gives you choice over your behavior. You’ll stop behaving in ways you later regret. You’ll also stop failing to do what you know you want to do, or know you should do.

With a wider, more aware perspective, you’ll see the consequences of your thoughts, internal pictures, and actions. And, in clearly seeing this, those things you’re doing that don’t serve you will fall away.

Why? Because you can’t do something that doesn’t serve you and do it with awareness. You can do something over and over (in fact, for your entire life) if you do it without awareness–which is what most people do. You can’t, however, do something that isn’t resourceful with awareness and keep doing it.

I want to be very clear, though, that awareness of how you do something isn’t the same as knowing that you do it. You probably know that you do all kinds of things that aren’t good for you. You may even know why you do them. You may have noticed, though, that knowing this has not helped you to stop doing those things.

Awareness, in this case, means actually seeing what you do inside that generates the outcome, as you do it, and making the connection between what you do and what is created when you do it. Doing this requires quite a bit of awareness, which is why the awareness created by Holosync is so valuable.

It’s also crucial that you become aware of what you believe, because most of what happens in your life flows from something you believe. A belief is something you think is true. When you look at beliefs more closely, though, you see that believing involves a kind of faulty, circular logic.

Look at it this way. Why do you believe that something is true? That’s right–because you have “evidence”. This assumes, though, that “having evidence” is a good way to determine whether or not something is true. It seems like common sense, but is it?

Here’s the problem: no matter what you believe, you’ll automatically generate evidence that it’s true. In other words, you’ll find a way to convince yourself that anything you believe is ”true”. You could just as easily say that the whole idea of ”true” is faulty, since whatever you believe will create its own evidence. Believe something, and you’ll accumulate evidence that you’re right. Meanwhile, someone else is busy accumulating evidence that the opposite belief is also true.

How do you create this evidence? There are three ways. First, you unconsciously attract people and situations that help you accumulate evidence that you’re right, as if you had some sort of psychic radar. By deciding what to believe, you’re deciding what kinds of people and situations you’ll attract or be attracted to–those who will help you be “right” about what you believe.

If you believe that the world is full of assholes (for instance), you’ll attract the perfect people and situations to help you prove that you’re right. Believe that you can do anything, and you’ll attract the people and situations that will allow you to be right about that. Whatever you believe, you’ll recruit people to help you prove it, and you’ll find yourself drawn to situations tailor-made to help you prove that you’re ”right”.

The second way you prove the “truth” of whatever you believe is by interpreting what is happening in a way that makes it seem that you’re right. Out of all the possible interpretations in any situation, you’ll pick the one that supports your belief, and reject the others.

And finally, you’ll act in a way that makes what you believe come true.

And, since this is all going on outside your awareness, you won’t even know you’re doing it! If you’re unaware of this process and how it works (which almost everyone is), you’ll do it unconsciously, and it will look like all the things you believe really are true.

All you’ve done, though, is selectively (and unconsciously) select people and situations that allow you to be right (while avoiding the people and situations that would contradict what you believe), select the interpretation of what is happening that allows you to be right, and act in a way that causes you to be right.

Had you selected different people and situations, picked a different interpretation, or acted in a different way, you would have generated a different set of ”evidence”, and something else would have appeared to be true. So what seems to be ”true” is just whatever appears that way, based on something you do.

So, becoming aware of your beliefs, and observing how they generate the people, situations, and outcomes in your life, is pretty important, don’t you think?

Or, you can just unconsciously keep believing whatever you already believe, and keep unconsciously generating whatever outcomes those beliefs create.

There are several more internal processes you use to create your experience of life, but if you learn to observe these basics, you’ll probably figure out the rest (or, I can teach them to you). Watch these basics with awareness and you become a remarkable person, one other people will marvel at. You’ll see things about “reality” that will completely change your view of life, the universe, and your place in it. And, you’ll discover that a lot of what you thought was true is complete delusion.

There is a price to pay to achieve this kind of mastery, however. What you’re setting out to become aware of is very illusive. It zooms by very quickly, and in the beginning it’s quite outside your awareness. You won’t be good at it right away. Like anything else worth mastering, it takes practice and persistence to become aware of how you create your reality.

Are you willing to pay this price?

If you aren’t, that’s fine. If that’s the case, be content with the amount of control you have right now over your life, because it isn’t going to get any better unless you become more aware.

If you are willing, and you keep practicing, a whole new world will open up for you, and most of the problems of life will fall away.

You’ll be left with the two “givens” I’ve told you about: that everything is impermanent, and that there’s no escape from cause and effect. You’re just going to have to let go regarding the problem of impermanence. You can either surrender, or fight, and since it’s a fight you can’t win, fighting just creates suffering, for you and for others. You might as well fight against breathing, or circulating your blood.

As for cause and effect, though you can’t escape from it, you can, if you’re aware, see the potential consequences of your internal processes and your actions. With this awareness, you can choose to a much greater degree which effects you’re willing to experience.

How, then, do you pay the price to have this awareness? My first suggestion would be to commit yourself to meditating daily with Holosync. Holosync isn’t the only way to create the necessary awareness, but it’s the best (and fastest) way I’ve found.

Second, spend some time each day observing your internal pictures and internal dialog, and noticing how they directly create your internal states. You might, for instance, get into bed each night and spend five or ten minutes recalling one or two significant experiences from your day. Rewind your memory tape and see if you can determine what you said to yourself and what pictures you made, and how these things created the internal states you experienced at the time.

Or, think about someone you have strong feelings about, either positive or negative. Notice the internal representations you make, and the feelings that follow from them.

You might also pick another time to practice during the day, so that you spend ten to twenty minutes a day, divided into at least two sessions, observing your internal representations. Keep in mind that at first you might not be very good at it. If you keep practicing, however, even if it’s hard at first, you’ll get better at it. Eventually you won’t be able to make internal representations that don’t serve you without seeing yourself do it. Once you see that you’re doing it (see, not know), you won’t be able to keep doing it.

Here’s something else you can do. Notice if there’s a result you don’t like that keeps happening in your life. Perhaps you never seem to get the respect you think you deserve. Maybe you keep getting stuck in a lousy job. Perhaps your relationships don’t work out and you keep ending up alone. Maybe you keep losing your money when you invest.

Whatever it is, consider that you might have an underlying core belief about yourself, other people, or the world that causes you to 1) attract the perfect people and situations to help you prove you’re right, 2) choose from all possible choices the one interpretation that make it seem that you’re right, even if there are other possibilities, and 3) act in ways that cause you to be right about what you believe.

Once you figure out what the belief is, instead of trying to get rid of it or change it, watch yourself prove that it’s true. Go into the next situation knowing that you’re going to prove that you’re right, and watch to see how you do it. Become incredibly curious to find out how you do it. Watch your internal representations. Observe what meanings you place on what happens. Watch how you make decisions about what to do, and with whom. Watch your actions.

Become fascinated to discover how you arrange to be right. If what you’re proving doesn’t serve you, watching in this way will make it impossible to continue. You will lose all enthusiasm and motivation to keep going, and the belief (and the outcomes it creates) will fall away.

Finally, if you want to go much more deeply into how what you do on an unconscious level creates your reality, consider taking my Life Principles Integration Process online courses. Just go to www.centerpointe.com/change to read about these courses (and to enroll), or go to www.centerpointe.com/life/preview to listen to a free preview lesson.

You can’t control everything in life, but you can control enough of it to allow yourself to create an amazing, fulfilling life that contains most of what you want. You’ll even figure out how to turn what you didn’t want, when it happens, into an opportunity. Sometimes you even end up with more than you thought possible.

That’s what happen to me, and it can happen to you, too.

***

Before I let you go, I have two Five Star recommendations for you, one highly entertaining and the other highly educational.

The first is about my good friend Stuart Davis. Stuart is totally crazy–but in the best possible way. He’s also one of the most talented people on this planet, and I really mean that (I can’t speak for other planets, but Stuart probably can).

Stuart is a super-talented indie-rock musician and composer (he has, I believe, 14 or 15 albums), an hysterically funny comedian, a talented writer, a social commentator in the same vein (the jugular vein, I believe), as Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, and a very talented visual artist.

I wanted to alert you to the fact that Stuart has a new TV show on HDNet. I have an advanced copy of the first six shows, and they are FUNNY IRREVERENT FUNNY THOUGHTFUL BIZARRE OUT-THERE FUNNY (if you know what I mean). Really funny. I strongly suggest that you watch this show! Here is a press release about it:

Zen Buddhist-indie rocker Stuart Davis is launching a new comedy series: Sex, God, Rock ‘n Roll. Season One of this ground-breaking TV show debuts April 26 on HDNet across the U.S. and Canada. Sex, God, Rock ‘n Roll is written, directed, and hosted by Stuart Davis, and features edgy humor from the open-hearted maniac. Each episode follows Stuart performing stand up comedy, news, sketches, and his acclaimed music. A twisted mind and a sensitive soul, David has made a career out of parsing tricky topics, and Sex, God, Rock ‘n Roll finds this ‘Punk Monk’ at his multi-faceted best.

“We are excited to welcome Stuart Davis and Sex, God, Rock ‘n Roll to HDNet. Stuart is one of a kind, and we are thrilled he is on HDNet.” –Marc Cuban, President of HDNet

Davis has studied his heroes (Ricky Gervais, Amy Sedaris, Jon Stewert), but is finding a unique voice with his ’spiritual’ brand of comedy. SGR&R is a delirious dive into life’s Mysteries through the mind of a Cosmo-centric comedian. It’s no wonder Davis has become known as the Twisted Mystic.

“Without exaggeration, Stuart Davis is one of the most fascinating and exceptional songwriters in modern music.” –San Jose Metro

While Davis is a happily hyphenated artist (writer-director-actor-comedian-songwriter), he’s first known for his music. The sound track to Season One of SGR&R (’Songs From The TV Series’) is being released simultaneously with the debut of the TV show. The first single, Twisted Mystery, hits radio in April and is also featured on Showtime in the series I Can’t Believe I’m Still Single. Davis will be touring nationally through the summer to promote the TV series and the new collection of pop songs.

So mark April 26 on your calendar and watch Stuart make fun of everything you hold near and dear. You can also learn more, and see clips of Stuart (and other bizarre stuff), at www.sexgodrocknroll.com.

***

My second recommendation is of a completely different nature. If you have kids, and you want them to excel at school and at life, check out Supercamp. My friend Bobbi DePorter, a fellow-member of Jack Canfield’s Transformational Leadership Council, started Supercamp many years ago, and it is the premier learning and life-skills experience for young people.

If your son or daughter would benefit from state-of-the-art methods for studying, problem-solving, relationship success, or could use more self-esteem, better grades, more confidence, more motivation, and the opportunity to learn and internalize the keys to life success, take a look at Supercamp.

About fifteen ago (before I knew Bobbi DePorter), I sent my daughter, Brisa, to Supercamp. She was already a good student, but after Supercamp she became unstoppable. Eventually she became a National Merit Scholar and was offered two full-ride scholarships (to Lewis and Clark College and Scripps College), and was also admitted to two prestigeous Ivy League colleges. Brisa will turn 25 in June, and I still see evidence of what she learned at Supercamp. I highly recommend this incredible program.

You can watch a great 6-minute video on their home page (upper right-hand corner) at www.supercamp.com. If you have a school-age son or daughter (or grandchild), please go watch it.

You can also listen to a longer teleseminar at www.supercamp.com/supercamp_teleseminar.html. It’s called “Teen Success in Challenging Times/Practical Tips on How You Can Help Your Teen”.

Finally, please share this blog post with people you care about.

Be well.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Also think for a moment about all the people you know about, but don’t know personally–politicians, celebrities, leaders, and so on.

All these people have one important thing in common: they’re all doing their best to make sense of what it means to be a human being.

Think about it. Here we are, on this spinning rock ball, in the middle of endlessly vast space, in a thin and fragile protected environment absolutely necessary to us if we’re to stay alive. We come into the world, and then, after an undetermined amount of time, we’re gone. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

(Actually, if you think about it, it would be more accurate to say that we come OUT of the world, like an apple comes out of an apple tree, but that’s another story, for another day.)

When you think about it, doesn’t it strike you that this whole business of being a person is quite weird? I mean, what’s it all about? Why is it happening? Is there any purpose to it? If so, what is it?

One of the reasons we wonder so deeply and so universally about these questions is, I believe, that as it’s all going on, we suffer. Our tender bodies allow us to connect and interact with the world, but this same sensitivity also makes us vulnerable to pain. Then there’s the fact that we want things, but sometimes we don’t get them. When that happens, we also suffer. Then there are the times where we get what we don’t want, and we suffer when that happens, too.

As if that weren’t enough, we’re each part of a gigantic web of cause and effect over which we have minimal control. Numberless ongoing physical events throughout the universe affect our galaxy, our solar system, our planet, and, ultimately, our lives. There’s nothing we can do about cosmic rays, gravity, weather patterns, the tides, sunspots, the seasons, the Earth’s magnetic field, the tectonic movements of the continents, earthquakes, the volcanic stirrings beneath the Earth’s crust, the makeup of the atmosphere–and an infinite number of other things totally beyond our control.

What’s more, billions of people, including you, are acting to get what they want in each moment. Some of these actions affect you directly (positively or negatively), while others affect you in a less direct way. Even far-removed events still have an effect on you, though it may be less apparent.

And though your own actions give you some small degree of control over what happens, ultimately you’re at the mercy of forces vastly beyond your control. There’s no getting around it: there is no escape from cause and effect.

As if this wasn’t enough, there’s another big reason why we suffer. Despite our puny influence on cause and effect, we still manage to get what we want some of the time. But even when this happens, whatever it is eventually passes away or falls apart. Everything is impermanent.

We probably suffer about this more than anything else. Nothing lasts. The people and things we love won’t last, and neither will we. Because of this, even though we can enjoy things while they exist, and can enjoy life while it lasts, human existence is imbued with a certain underlying regret or melancholy–an underlying awareness of the transience of things, and a bittersweet sadness at their passing.

You might not have thought of it this way, but much of life, and much of our effort to make sense of it, consists of an attempt to come to terms with these two things: that we’re caught in a web of cause and effect over which we have very limited control, and that all things are impermanent, including ourselves.

Humans have come up with endless strategies to try to deal with this. Some just don’t want to think about it. They stay busy, distracting themselves with activity, drugs, striving, or something else. Some create an after-life or rebirth, or a higher power that they hope does have control, and who might hopefully have a larger plan we’re unaware of, that hopefully will cause everything to turn out alright.

Some decide to make hay while the sun shines. They strive to accumulate wealth, or power, hoping to gain more of a fighting chance in the struggle against cause and effect. Others do what they can to fend off the inevitability of impermanence with modern medicine, exercise, and healthy living. Some find comfort in leaving good works or some sort of legacy that will remain after they’re gone.

Some people just try to stay high all the time. Others become interested in philosophy, hoping to find an explanation. Others become deeply angry and lose control. Still others hope that controlling their mind will provide an answer.

Some hope that individual action will save them. Others seek the security of their group, their tribe, their religion. “If I follow the rules, everything will be fine.” Some divide the world into good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate, and fight against the bad and run after the good. Others hope their adherence to certain guiding principles and ideas will help. Others hope that going beyond principles and ideas, into a state of “no mind,” will provide a solution.

Though it’s not hard to find people who swear by the effectiveness of each of these methods, so far no one has found a way to escape from cause and effect, and no one has found a way to escape from the underlying impermanence of all things. We don’t like to hear this, though. It gives us an uneasy feeling. “There’s no escape? There’s nothing I can do?” So, many people hold out hope that there will turn out to be an afterlife, or that reincarnation will bring them back again (interestingly, Buddhists and Hindus are hoping to step out of that cycle, not perpetuate it).

You may have tried many, or even most of, these methods. You may have tried them all. I’ve tried most of them myself. In the short run, all of them work, or at least seem to work while you’re involved in them. In the long run, none of them work.

As infants we hope that if we cry loudly enough someone will take away our suffering. That’s the only method we have access to. As small children we imagine magical powers that will give us control over what happens (we also keep the crying option open). As we get older, we stop thinking that we have magical powers, but instead attribute them to a parade of powerful others: parents, authority figures, worldly (or spiritual) leaders, a romantic partner, or some higher power.

None of these methods, though, allows us to escape from cause and effect, or from impermanence, because there is no escape. Maybe that’s why we feel so profoundly disappointed (and sometimes angry) when it becomes apparent that one of these “powerful others” isn’t going to provide the answer, the salvation, the solace, or the solution.

No one escapes from these two cornerstones of the human condition. Some people, though, do come to terms with them. Except in rare cases, though, this doesn’t happen until every possible means of escape has been tried.

Human development (which I’ve written about extensively on this blog–see the first dozen or so posts) can be seen as a series of increasingly sophisticated approaches for dealing with impermanence and cause and effect, along with an increasingly broader perspective about such things. Magical thinking (I have magic powers that allow me to control the universe) and mythic thinking (placing the magical power in a powerful other rather than in the self) are examples of this, but there are many other ways human beings attempt to defeat or forestall the effects of cause and effect and impermanence.

You’re probably thinking that I’m about to suggest a solution to all of this. I’m not. I don’t have a solution. There isn’t one. I’m sorry to be the one to break it to you, but there really IS no escape.

But what if we took the fact that there’s no escape as a starting point, instead of fighting it or ignoring it? What if we could somehow come to terms with death and other forms of impermanence, and with cause and effect? Wouldn’t that at least be more realistic? Perhaps surrendering to “what is” would do something that would make life worthwhile, despite the realities–in the same way that someone who has finally accepted their terminal illness exudes a transcendental radiance and inner peace, creating a sense of awe (and a contact high) in everyone around them.

Buddhists call the unwillingness to accept impermanence and cause and effect delusion, ignorance–in other words, an ignoring of the most basic facts of life. But, you say, accepting all of this seems to be such a profoundly negative outlook. Ironically, though, this embracing of “what is” turns out to be incredibly freeing.

I mentioned earlier that you probably won’t give up your struggle against these two until you’ve tried everything. Just being told that there’s no escape doesn’t work. Reading this post isn’t going to change anything for you. Even if you agree on an intellectual level that there’s no escape, you’ll still keep trying to escape–until and unless you run out of options.

There are some people running around who still believe the Earth is flat. No amount of arguing will change the minds of such people. To change the mind of such a person, you’ll have to show them, experientially. How would you do that? You might say to them, “Well of course the Earth is flat. Wouldn’t it be fun to go look over the edge?”

And, then to make sure you didn’t wander around in circles, and not find the edge just because you were sloppy about your search, you’d program your GPS and head due east, for instance, on a certain line of latitude. In other words, you’d head for the edge you’re hoping to find, in a disciplined way. Then, when the two of you finally returned to the place where you’d started, the flat-Earth person would have to at least admit that the Earth is a cylinder.

In much the same way, a good spiritual teacher will send you off in a disciplined search for a solution to the problems of impermanence and cause and effect–not to find a solution (though that’s what you think is going on), but rather to get you to try every way out, until you have no choice but to come to the inevitable conclusion, from personal experience, that there really is no escape.

I’ve discussed Zen master Genpo Roshi’s innovative Big Mind process many times in this blog. In this approach, you’re asked to speak from various “voices” or aspects of the self (as well as those of the transcendent “no-self”). One of the most potent of these voices is the voice of Great Doubt. This voice represents the part of you that really, truly doubts everything, including that there’s any possible escape, solution, or salvation.

Amazingly, when you really get into the voice of Great Doubt, instead of the darkness and gloom you might expect, you find ultimate freedom. This gives us a second way to drop your impossible quest for a way to escape: you could try every possible way out, until you exhaust every possibility, or you could go right to Great Doubt–be Great Doubt.

Great Doubt is, in fact, the road to Great Enlightenment. Few, however, want to go there. After all, it seems so negative. Great Doubt involves doubting that ANYTHING will save you: your ideas, your knowledge, your skills and expertise, your health, your accomplishments, the power you’ve accumulated, your religion, your physical prowess, your money, your possessions, your fame, your self-esteem, the respect you’ve earned, the therapy you’ve gone through, your love relationship, your children, your friends, your healthy diet, your doctors, your philosophy, yoga, meditation–or anything else.

Let me be clear that I’m not against any of these things. All of the above are part of what makes life juicy, interesting, and worth living. However, if you’re doing them under the illusion that they’ll save you from cause and effect or impermanence, you’ll always end up disappointed.

When you doubt–and therefore see through–all of these things, when you’ve doubted it all (that is, doubted that any of it will ultimately save you from cause and effect and impermanence), there’s nothing left to hang onto. In a spiritual and psychic sense, you’re naked. This seems like it would be very negative, doesn’t it? But once Great Doubt brings you to the place where you have nothing to hang onto, something remarkable happens and YOU’RE FREE.

There’s a koan in Buddhism: How do you take the first step off a 100 foot pole? It seems that taking that step would lead to death, annihilation–a splat on the pavement. Unless you actually take that step, though, you never discover that when you hit bottom, you bounce.

I once heard Alan Watts tell a story about a play he saw when he was a little boy. The curtain opens to a man sleeping in a fancy Victorian-era room crammed with fringed lamps, extravagant Victorian furniture, and all kinds of ornamental gewgaws and bric-a-brac. The alarm clock rings, which enrages the man so much that he grabs his shoe and begins smashing the alarm clock until it’s a flattened pile of metal and gears.

He then jumps out of bed and in his rage begins tearing the sheets off the bed and ripping them to shreds. He then smashes the crockery and the mirror and the furniture, and everything else, until the room is a scene of total demolition. The last thing standing is a tall floor lamp with a fringed lampshade. In a final act of anger, he picks up the lamp and throws it across the room…and it bounces. The surprise is that it’s made of rubber.

Though the actual contents of the story have nothing to do with what I’m talking about (other than the idea that, in the end, you “bounce”), it created such a vivid image that I’ve never forgotten it. Watts told this story to illustrate what I’m saying here: when you take that step off the 100 foot pole–when you really and truly give up all hope that anything can save you from cause and effect, or impermanence–you bounce. When you step into the abyss–or what looks to be the abyss–the dreadful consequence you were so afraid of doesn’t happen.

Instead, you discover that you are free. You discover that you are the transcendent, the unborn/undying pure awareness, the Christ, the Buddha, the One. This realization is freedom. Then, for a while, you float along in this transcendent state, where there are no problems and no one to have them, because you’re the infinite Oneness that was never born and will never die.

Later, you might come to see that even though that’s who you are, the organism through which you’re experiencing who you are is still subject to impermanence and cause and effect.

Until you decide to actually take that leap, though, what else can you do? Let’s start, then, from the assumption that there really is no escape–even if you’re the Buddha–and that you can choose to surrender to impermanence or fight it, but either way, it will win. True wisdom is seeing things as they really are.

Here you are, then, in a universe over which you have little control, and where everything eventually falls apart, including you. You realize, though, that who you really are is beyond the separate me in a bag of skin you thought you were. Still though, here you are, living (for now) in the relative world, a world of cause and effect and impermanence.

I’ve often said that awareness provides the solution to all problems. Let me explain how that’s the case even in this situation. I’ve also said that awareness gives you choice. So look at it this way. If you are caught in cause and effect (which you are), and you’re unaware, you’ll be likely to unknowingly place yourself in situations where the consequences–the effect–involve getting something you don’t want. You’ll find yourself with outcomes you don’t want, with people you don’t want, in situations you don’t want to be in.

If you have enough awareness, though, you can see that web of cause and effect before you act. You can see the inevitable karma (to use the Eastern philosophy word) you create whenever you think a certain thought, make a certain picture in your head, make a certain decision, or take a certain action. With enough awareness, no matter how complex the situation, you’ll see the potential consequences, and act accordingly. You’ll enter into life choosing the consequences you experience.

To the degree that you’re unaware, you’re quite likely to step into one situation after another, think one thought after another, make one decision after another, which leads to suffering, both for you and for others.

So while you can’t do anything about the fact that as a human being you’re subject to cause and effect, you can choose–if you’re aware–what consequences you create, what situations you enter into, what thoughts you think, what decisions you make and which actions you take. Though consequences are inevitable, you do have a choice about which consequences you generate.

The gift of awareness is choice. Remain unaware, though, and you have little or no choice. When you’re unaware, life seems to “just happen,” and some of what happens is unnecessarily painful. Suffering is built into life, due to cause and effect and the impermanence of all things. From these two there is no escape. None. The super-aware human being surrenders to impermanence, because all other choices involve delusion–the delusion that you can do something about it.

The super-aware human being also sees how cause and effect works and, in that awareness, CHOOSES how he becomes involved in it. Knowing that all thoughts and all actions have consequences, he chooses the thoughts and actions whose consequences he’s willing to experience. I choose, for instance, to be emotionally involved with Centerpointe. Because Centerpointe, like everything else, is impermanent, I know it will change and eventually fall apart. I also choose to be attached to my wife, Denise; to my daughter, Brisa, and to my son, Evan.

To be unattached to these things would make life, well, lifeless. I also know that this attachment generates consequences, but being aware, I can see them. I also know that everything I’m attached to is a choice I’ve made, with full knowledge of what I’m getting myself into. Without awareness, though, these things are not a choice.

The only thing that really gives you a leg-up in this world is awareness. Ironically, you are that awareness. That’s the only thing that was never born and never dies. That Pure Awareness, the real you, is beyond impermanence, and beyond cause and effect. The body you’re in, however, and the concepts and ideas that make up who you think you are–what I’ve called your Map of Reality, or what could be called “the separate self”–are all impermanent, and are all subject to cause and effect.

This is why Holosync is so important. Holosync creates awareness in a way I’ve never seen anything else do. As you become more aware, you start to see how you’ve been unknowingly creating the karma, the consequences, that you’ve been experiencing. The more aware you become, the more clearly you see this. And the more you see it, the more you automatically know the most resourceful thing to do in each moment.

Zen master Genpo Roshi makes a distinction between the human part of you, the part that is subject to impermanence and cause and effect, and the being part of you, the pure awareness that is beyond these. Ultimately, while you’re here, in a body, as a living thing (a “sentient being,” as they say in Buddhism), you are both human and being. The idea, then, is to integrate your humanness with your beingness, to transcend, and at the same time include, both. Genpo calls the result of this integration “the one who consciously chooses to be a human being.”

I’m not going to tell you to surrender to impermanence, because you won’t do it until you’re truly convinced that there’s no other choice. No one takes that first step off the 100 foot pole until they have no choice, though sometimes you fall without intending to. I am going to tell you, however, to do everything you can to become more aware. In my opinion, that means meditating with Holosync every day.

Another tool I’ve create to help you with this process are my Life Principles Integration Process online courses. These courses show you, among other things, where to direct that awareness in order to create the greatest amount of choice. (You can learn more about these courses–which, considering what you get and how you will change, are ridiculously inexpensive by going to www.centerpointe.com/change. You can also listen to a free preview lesson at www.centerpointe.com/life/preview. (And, until April 15th, the price is much lower.)

I would also strongly recommend that if you are really interested in your psychological and spiritual growth that you bend Heaven and Earth to attend one of the weekend workshops Genpo Roshi and I have been offering. The next one will be in Vancouver, B.C., on June 27-28. These workshops are the fast-track to waking up, and they are extremely affordable (greatly reduced price). To register, go to www.centerpointe.com/bigmind.

Alan Watts used to say that from the moment of your birth, you’re in free-fall. Clutching at the other things falling alongside you isn’t going to help. While there might not be any escape from impermanence and cause and effect, there is a way to enjoy the ride, and to be much more in charge of what happens during your plunge to the bottom. Awareness is the key.

Keep watching, and be well.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

“You are full of promise.”

This post is going to be a bit different than the others you’ve read or listened to here. I want to tell you about a friend of mine–an amazing man, Bob Danzig. This post, more than any of the others, is a must-read.

Because of Centerpointe’s huge success, I’ve been fortunate enough to meet many amazing people. Bob Danzig is certainly one of the top two or three. Just spending time with Bob Danzig leaves you feeling good about yourself and more confident about your own value and what you can accomplish.

One reason why Bob is so amazing has to do with his sad and difficult childhood–and his amazingly successful and inspirational adult life. For twenty years Bob was CEO of the entire Hearst Newspaper Group, a multi-billion dollar company, working his way up from office boy in a small newspaper in Albany, New York. Considering where he started, his story shows how anyone, with the right encouragement from people who care, can create a life that matters.

Bob never had a family. Instead, he grew up in a series of foster homes. In one home, he slept in an attic with no lights. The family he lived with would leave his dinner on the bottom step of the attic stairs. He ate in the attic, alone, in the dark.

For his entire childhood Bob owned one pair of much-too-large scuffed black sneakers that he grew into over several years by taking out bits of the tissue paper stuffed in the toes as his feet grew. His other possessions consisted of two shirts, two pairs of jeans, two pairs of socks, and two pairs of underwear. ”When I had to move to a new foster home,” Bob says, ”I would reach under my mattress, take out the folded black plastic trash bag I kept there, put my clothes in it, and move to a new home.”

Today, Bob is in his 70s, and is one of the kindest, most gracious, most inspirational–and most well-dressed–people I’ve ever known. As I learned more about his childhood, I understood why dressing well is so important to him. When he got his first job at the Times Union newspaper in Albany, New York, each pay period he took a part of his paycheck and bought himself one nice piece of clothing–a quality shirt, a cashmere sweater, a pair of Italian slacks, a silk necktie, and so forth.

He never wore dungarees or blue jeans–they brought back too many painful memories of his childhood. He was embarrassed about the two sets of plain and wrinkled clothing he alternated every other day. “The other kids had clean, unwrinkled clothes. They looked like someone cared about them. I wanted someone to care about me.”

No one ever took Bob to the beach. No one took him fishing. He never had a baseball card collection. His few friendships didn’t last because he never lived in one place for very long.

Despite his lonely, sad childhood, Bob Danzig became a Fortune 500 CEO and an inspiration to his employees and to thousands of other people, including me. Today he writes books and speaks to thousands of people each year, donating all the money he earns to help foster children.

Bob had to leave the foster care system when he graduated from high school at age sixteen. “You’re probably thinking that a guy has to be pretty smart to finish high school at sixteen,” he told me. This happened, however, because of a mistake. When he was moving from one foster home to another, the school made a mistake and placed him in the wrong grade. As he told me, “Then I just drifted through those grades.”

Can you imagine what this was like? Never having a family, never doing what normal kids do, moving from place to place whenever a family couldn’t keep him or didn’t want him, never staying long enough to make friends or create a close connection with anyone, and then being totally on your own at age sixteen?

One important incident from those years never left him, and he still talks about it. Mae Morse, the social worker who met with him periodically and who would send him on to his next foster home when his foster family ”didn’t want him anymore” said something to him that changed his life forever. At the end of each of their meetings, he told me, she would take his hands in hers and say, “Bobby, don’t you ever forget this. You are worthwhile.”

Here’s how he described his reaction in his book, Conversations With Bobby:

“Just like that, she uttered such a simple, pure sentence. But the funny thing is, the reason I remember it so vividly is because I know she meant it. I could tell she was genuine and sincere. She truly wanted me to know that I, Bobby Danzig, was worthwhile. She had no motive for saying what she did. I had nothing to offer, she had nothing to gain. I was worthwhile–not because I would shine shoes. I was worthwhile–not because I would carry coal. I was worthwhile–not because I would make no trouble. Just me, I mattered.”

This, he said, was like “warm milk pouring over me, the idea that I had some sense of possibility and promise.”

When Bob left foster care, he got a job at Montgomery Ward in the wholesale mattress department. His job was to climb up onto catwalks high above the floor, find the mattress the foreman wanted, and push it over the edge onto a trampoline on wheels, after which it was wheeled out to the customer.

One day he must have mistaken the number the foreman called out, because when he pushed the mattress over the edge, there was no trampoline. Instead, the mattress hit his boss, and he was fired. That night, he told a friend what had happened. The friend had just been promoted from office boy to clerk at the Albany Times Union newspaper. “If you get down there fast, you might be able to get my old job,” his friend told him. “But you look kind of young. You’d better get a hat.”

So Bob went to a men’s clothing store, bought his first hat, and went to the newspaper offices. Nine others were waiting to see about the job, and Bob was the last to be interviewed. The woman who interviewed him looked, in his words, “like a pitbull.” The first thing she said to him was, “Why are you wearing that hat in here? Don’t you know it’s rude to wear your hat indoors?”

Bob had never owned a hat, so he didn’t know anything about hat etiquette, but for some reason this woman–the office manager–saw something in him she liked, and he got the job. It was the lowest possible job at a newspaper, but Bob eventually became an advertising salesman, then head of the advertising department, and eventually the publisher of the Times Union. Later he became CEO of the entire Hearst newpaper group, managing a considerable number of newspapers, many popular magazines (Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Harpers Bazaar, Popular Mechanics, Country Living, Colonial Homes, and many others), and 27 television stations.

A few months after starting as office boy, the office manager called him into her office. “I’ve been watching you,” she said. “Oh, no. Fired again,” he thought. But she continued, “and I just wanted to tell you that I believe that you are filled with promise.”

This had such a powerful effect on him that even after becoming publisher of that newspaper, after the Hearst Company later sent him to Stanford University on a journalism fellowship, and even after he became head of the entire Hearst newspaper group, he never stopped hearing those words.

When I heard this story I was reminded just how powerful what we say to others can be, especially if you’re a parent or in some other position of respect and authority.

I want to tell you how I met Bob Danzig, because he has had a powerful effect on my life.

In the late 1990s, during the dot-com days when venture capitalists were giving new internet companies millions of dollars, I thought I’d should try to get some of that money, too, and start an internet company.

An advisor told me that the first thing I should do was to put together a board of directors of prominent business people. I didn’t know any prominent people then, and I wasn’t sure how to find any, much less convince them to be on the board of my start-up company. I told Jim Hennig, a friend who had been the president of the National Speakers Association, about my idea. Jim, who knew many prominent business people, said, “I know who you should get. Bob Danzig.” He told me a little bit about Bob and made an introduction.

I was a bit awed to be speaking to someone like Bob Danzig on the telephone, but he was warm and gracious and even invited me to come to New York to have dinner with him at the Harvard Club in midtown Manhatten. The Harvard Club was just like what I’d imagined a private Ivy League club would be: dark wood panelling, expensive rugs, overstuffed chairs around warm fireplaces, old and beautiful artwork, and richly attired and attentive staff. Bob was friendly–and impeccably dressed. He seemed genuinely interested in me and my idea. Fifteen minutes into the conversation he said, “I have a feeling we’re going to do big things together.”

When he said this, you could have knocked me over with a feather. You have to realize that at this point in my career Centerpointe wasn’t very big. I had six or seven employees and our “headquarters” was a small down-in-the-heels building that had once been a print shop. My spartan little office looked like the office of a warehouse manager. No art, no ferns, no credenza.

Every day I would show up for work, sit in my office all day, and do whatever needed to be done. I didn’t know more than two or three other people in the personal growth world–Hale Dwoskin at Sedona Training Associates and Pete Bissonette at Learning Strategies Corporation, and maybe two or three others. I had no business education other than the school of hard knocks. I was living in my own introverted little world, running Centerpointe with little or no communication or feedback from other personal growth leaders or business owners.

Other than the fact that Centerpointe was reasonably successful (the year I met Bob Danzig our sales were about $2M), I had no idea if my business skills were mediocre, competent, or something else. So what Bob said to me really meant a lot. “Wow,” I thought. “This guy was CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, and he wants to do something with me?” An hour later, when I asked if he’d be willing to serve on the board of directors of the new company, he said, “I’d be happy to serve on the board of any company that had Bill Harris as the CEO.”

I was stunned, and very happy. Now that I know more about Bob, his childhood, and the way he worked his way up from office boy to CEO of the entire company, I can see that he was doing for me what important mentors in his life had done for him–looking past my flaws and inexperience and seeing the promise in me–promise I didn’t yet see in myself–and then communicating it to me in a way that helped bring it out.

Literally days after I’d finished putting together what turned out to be a rather impressive board (Bob was the biggest, but not the only, ”star” I  recruited), the stock market crashed and all the start-up money for internet companies disappeared. The company never got off the ground. Instead, I turned my attention back to Centerpointe. Because Centerpointe has grown by about 900% since then, I’m glad it happened the way it did. I still stay in touch with Bob, though, and he still inspires me every time I speak to him. Just as he never forgot the people who told him, “You are worthwhile,” and “You are filled with promise,” I’ve never forgotten what he said to me because it significantly boosted my confidence.

Several years ago, after he’d become publisher of the Albany Times Herald, he tracked down Mae Morse, the social worker who had said to him, “You are worthwhile” when he was just a small boy. She was in a nursing home, old and frail. Here’s how Bob described their meeting in Conversations With Bobby:

“They had set her up in the parlor chair of the nursing home. She beamed when I walked in. I can see her so clearly, her knit shawl hung over her shoulders. I walked over to her and put my hands in hers. Before I could utter a word, she said to me, ‘Didn’t I always tell you that you are worthwhile?’ I was in awe. I told her how I looked forward to this day–the day when I could share with her my gratitude for the confidence and value she placed in me. I said to her, ‘In a life stuck in the shadows, you, Mae Morse, gave me my first shining moment that penetrated the darkness.’”

Other than the fact that Bob’s story is so touching, there’s another reason why I’m telling it to you. Somehow, out of my own painful childhood and my struggles to master my anger and depression and lack of success, hundreds of thousands of people now look up to me for help and seek my guidance. Believe me, in light of where I started and the person I used to be, no one is more surprised about this turn of events than I am.

Many people tell me that they benefit from Holosync and that they’ve had many “ah-ha’s” from the information I share. It’s obvious, however, that my focus is not motivational or inspirational. What I teach is more theoretical,  intellectual, and informational rather than inspirational.

So as we all do our best to navigate our way through some very difficult and scary times, I want to express to you something a little more heartfelt–something I’ve unfortunately failed to say as often, or as directly, as perhaps I should:

I value you. Even though I may never meet you in person, I’m glad that you’re in my life. You are worthwhile. You are filled with promise.

Everything I do at Centerpointe is based upon the premise that anyone, if they know what to do, can be happy, peaceful inside, and successful, regardless of their past or present circumstances. If I can do it, anyone can. So I want to express my hope that Holosync, along with all the other information and tools we provide at Centerpointe, will in some small way make is easier for you to navigate your life, and allow you to bring forth the promise that is in you, whether in bad or good times.

Be well.

[I urge you to visit Bob's website, www.bobdanzig.com, where, among other things, you can see a very moving clip of him speaking. Also, please purchase a copy of Conversations With Bobby, or one of his other books. Just go to Amazon and type in Conversations With Bobby. Every cent of Bob's book royalties and speaking fees go directly to the Child Welfare League of America to help foster children.]

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

This “automatic response” way of living often creates outcome you don’t want and didn’t intend. It limits, or even eliminates, choice. The more aware you are, however, the more choice you have—and the less likely you are to unconsciously create or attract people and situations you don’t want into your life.

Unless you’ve been with me for a while, the idea that increased awareness provides the solution to life’s problems might be a new and foreign idea to you. Using Holosync and the other courses and resources we’ve created here at Centerpointe, we’ve helped nearly a million people in 173 countries all over the world expand their awareness. As awareness increases, emotional problems fall away, mental abilities improve, stress diminishes, well being increases, and unwanted people and situations stop showing up in your life.

Meditation is the most powerful way I know of to increase awareness, and Holosync meditation increases awareness even more quickly than traditional meditation. If you then use that additional awareness to observe the part of your mind that generates your feelings and behaviors and causes you to attract or become attracted to certain people or situations in your life, you gain a tremendous amount of choice over your life. The more aware you become, the more difficult is it to do something that doesn’t serve you.

Post before last, we looked at the internal representations you make, primarily your internal dialog and the internal pictures you make. I suggested that you practice observing these internal representations because they (along with a few other internal mental processes) directly create your feelings and other internal states. These internal states then generate your behaviors and the people and situations you attract into your life.

Watching these internal processes is challenging at first, as you may have discovered if you tried to do it. You won’t master the ability to do it in just a few weeks, so keep working on it. As you get better at it, you’ll see some incredible positive changes in your life. (My Life Principles Integration Process online courses will take you, step-by-step, through this learning process. You can hear a free preview lesson at www.centerpointe.com/life/preview)

In my last post, I asked you to become aware of your shadows, aspects of yourself you’ve disowned or pushed down into the basement of your awareness because someone taught you that they were wrong or bad. Many, if not most, problems in life are actually an unconscious expression of these disowned parts, and becoming aware of them and re-owning them allows you to end the most stubborn life-long problems.

In this post, I want to look at another aspect of how your internal processes create most of what happens to you in your life, and all of your experience of and reaction to what happens—beliefs. A belief is a collection of internal representations about something you think is true in a certain area of life—a generalization you’ve made about life, about people in general, or about yourself.

Psychologists have pointed out something about beliefs that I find quite fascinating: beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies. This means that when you believe something you’ll figure out a way to make it come true in reality, or at least seem to be true. For some reason, when you believe something, you’ll do whatever it takes to be right about it—even if being right creates outcomes and experiences you don’t want.

Most people, in fact, spend their entire lives unconsciously arranging for what they believe to come true in reality (psychotherapist Dr. Eric Berne wrote an entire book about how people do this, Games People Play).

If you believe no one likes you, you’ll find a way to make sure the people you encounter don’t like you. Or, you’ll interpret the actions of others as evidence that they don’t like you —which in terms of your experience of life amounts to the same thing. If you believe you’ll never succeed, you’ll find a way to make that come true. If you believe you can’t make a lot of money, or that you can only make a certain amount of money, but no more, you’ll find a way to be right about that.

In fact, I’ll make a rather bold statement. Many—perhaps all—of the problems in your life—with relationships, finances, success or lack of success, or any other area, are the result of your unconscious attempts to prove that you’re right about what you believe. Your deeply held beliefs create your world.

As I’ve said so many times, because lack of awareness is the problem, awareness is the solution. Figure out what unexamined beliefs you’ve been unconsciously proving are true, and watch yourself prove them, with awareness, and you will eliminate the self-created difficulties in your life.

Life has plenty of intrinsic difficulties (including the fact that all things are impermanent and eventually fall apart), which I’ve discussed at length in other posts. Most of your problems and difficulties are not intrinsic to your life, however. You create them by acting unconsciously. By becoming more aware, you can stop creating them. Otherwise, you can—and will—keep creating the same problems, over and over, for your entire life. Most people do.

This is a fascinating subject because it’s about you and how you create your life. In recent posts I’ve emphasized a few aspects of life where we tend to operate unconsciously and automatically, without awareness. When we do this, we often create internal feelings and external outcomes that we didn’t intend and don’t want.

When you operate with awareness, however, you take your life off autopilot. With awareness you have choice, and the feelings you experience and the outcomes you create always end up being more resourceful.

Two posts ago we looked at the internal representations you make. Internal representations, though completely unconscious in most people, are an important part of how you make sense of and navigate through life. They are part of an internal map you’ve created, a map that generates how you feel in each moment, how you behave, and what people and situations you attract or become attracted to.

If you’re like most people, all of this happens outside your awareness. Become aware of your internal representations, though, and begin to observe how they shape your life, and that awareness dramatically changes everything. You begin to see that much of what you’ve been doing—unintentionally and automatically—doesn’t serve you. As you see this, you begin to exercise more choice.

In my last post, I asked you to look at another unconscious aspect of life: what many people call shadows—those parts or aspects you’ve disowned because you think they’re bad or wrong. Though you’ve pushed them out of your awareness, they leak out into your life anyway. You express them in covert and dysfunctional ways, creating substantial trouble in your life.

In fact, most if not all of what bothers you in life is a manifestation of disowned shadow material, and re-owning these shadows creates tremendous positive change. Again, awareness creates choice. Dysfunctional and immature reactions (which, since they’re unconscious, seem to just happen) become conscious and resourceful choices.

This time, I’d like to look at your beliefs and the huge affect they have on what happens in your life. Amazingly, most people never examine what they believe, or how a belief is transformed into what happens in their life.

Why do you believe something? Obviously it’s because you assume that it’s true, and you assume that it’s true because you have “evidence.” But beliefs, being self-fulfilling prophecies, generate their own evidence. Whatever you believe to be true, you’ll find a way to prove that you’re right (I’ll explain the three ways you do this in just a moment).

Because beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies, all beliefs are true! Or, you could just as easily say that no beliefs are really true. But this is a much more metaphysical question that I’ll address in another post. For now, let’s just assume that whatever you believe, as time goes by you’ll accumulate more and more evidence to prove that you’re right. The more evidence you generate, the stronger the belief—and the stronger the belief, the more additional evidence you’ll accumulate.

Anything you believe will turn out to be true, or at least seem to be true, because you’ll generate whatever evidence you need. What you believe feeds on itself until it seems obviously true—even though someone else believes the opposite, and is busy accumulating evidence that they are right (what’s wrong with these people, who can’t see that you’re right?). In this way, your unexamined premises about what’s true and what isn’t dramatically affect what happens in your life.

We develop closely-held beliefs, about who we are, what is possible, what people are like, and what the world is like, while we’re growing up. In other words, we make these important and influential decisions about who we are, about what is possible, about other people, and about the world, at a time when we have limited information, limited experience, and limited thinking ability. Then we defend these beliefs, in many cases, for the rest of our lives, creating and accumulating more and more evidence that they’re true. If the belief is resourceful, great, but if it isn’t—if, for instance, it limits what is possible—you’ll create a life where you get to be right, but at a terrible cost.

If you got the impression when you were a child that you weren’t very smart, this could be the beginning of a life-long belief that strongly affects your life. Perhaps you were confused by the alphabet in kindergarten and gave a wrong answer. The other kids laughed and you began to believe that you weren’t very smart.

With this seed of a belief, you’ll begin to attract additional “evidence” that you’re right, and the belief becomes stronger. Not wanting to make another mistake, you feel anxious when the teacher calls on you (this, by the way, is caused by making internal representations of not making a mistake or not being laughed at—in other words, of what you don’t want), which causes you to make more mistakes. Since you don’t think you’re smart enough anyway, you don’t try as hard, or you give up entirely. Even the normal mistakes that all the kids make seem like proof that you aren’t smart enough.

Soon there’s no doubt in your mind that you were indeed passed over when the brains were distributed.

Often people don’t even remember the root cause events that became the seeds of their key beliefs, because these events happened so long ago. What’s more, when we’re small and inexperienced at life, we’re more likely to globalize isolated but strongly-charged emotional experiences, assuming that a one-time experience represents the way things always are and always will be.

It’s as if you saw one bad movie and concluded that all movies are a waste of time, or had one bad experience with a dog and concluded that all dogs are dangerous.

Also consider that most of our beliefs about ourselves, other people, and the world come from our interactions with our parents. We assume that what they teach us about life is True (with a capital “T”). We don’t realize that our parents are in almost every case merely teaching us what their parents taught them, regardless of the potential negative consequences. And, since all beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies, if our parents’ views are inaccurate or not resourceful, ours will be, too.

So there you are, quite small, quite inexperienced at life, with the narrowest of perspectives, and with little or no education or knowledge, trusting the views of your parents about who you are and what is possible, about people in general, and about life. Since what you believe in great part creates your life, does this seem like the best way to decide what to believe? And, since once the seed of a belief is formed, you’ll spend your entire life accumulating “evidence” that it’s true, whether a belief is true or not is beside the point. Since beliefs are self-fulfilling prophecies, the important consideration is whether or not they are resourceful.

I said that there are three ways you prove that what you believe is true. Let’s take a look at them. The first way is by unconsciously attracting or becoming attracted to situations and people that help you to be right about what you believe. In other words, you unconsciously recruit people to help you prove that you’re right.

If you believe no one likes you, you’ll attract or become attracted to people who find it difficult to like anyone, or who at least don’t like people like you. Whatever you believe, you’ll develop a kind of internal radar that draws people into your life who will help you prove that you’re right. In a crowded room, you’ll unconsciously find each other. Other people won’t be as interesting to you or you to them. Unconsciously, you’ll look for people who will help you prove that you’re right about what you believe, and only certain people will qualify.

The people who will help you be right about what you believe are also trying to be right about something, which is why they’re attracted to you. In Games People Play, Dr. Eric Berne describes a number of common interactive patterns people use to prove that they’re right about their core beliefs (“nothing ever turns out right for me,” “people are out to get me,” etc.). The purpose of a “game” is to be right about something, and you are a genius at spotting and recruiting potential players.

“No one likes me,” then, could be seen as one of these games. If you want to prove that your belief is true, you’ll find people who won’t like you, and you’ll get to be right. The other player will also get to be right about what he or she believes, perhaps that the world is full of unlikable people.

At the end of the game, you’ll both have added more evidence that what you believe is true. In playing this game, you fail to notice all the other people out there that would like you, though, because they won’t be helpful to you in proving that you’re right. You don’t find them interesting and you aren’t attracted to them. The people who are predisposed not to like you, though, will attract you the most.

When you live unconsciously, without awareness, most of your life will be about attracting people and situations that allow you to prove that you’re right about what you believe. However, when you realize what doesn’t work in your life is the result of unconscious attempts to be right about something you believe, and you begin to watch yourself prove that you’re right, as it happens, something changes. Any belief that isn’t resourceful will fall away. Believe something with awareness and you won’t be able to keep doing it if it doesn’t serve you.

Let me give you an example from my own life. Throughout my teenage years my mother continually pointed out that, in her opinion, I was “just like my father,” and that no woman would ever be able to put up with me. Not only was I annoying just because I was a teenager, I also looked just like my father and shared many of his mannerisms. My parents had divorced when I was three, and my mother wasn’t too fond of my father, so the fact that I was a lot like my father triggered quite a negative reaction in her.

She must have told me at least a thousand times during my teenage years that no woman would ever be able to put up with me. I then spent the next twenty years attracting or being attracted to one woman after another who helped me prove that I was right. They, of course, were also busy proving something, and in a crowded room we would always find each other. Somehow, without any prior information, I could pick out of a crowd a woman who was attracted to me, and who was ready to play a game with me in which we’d both get to be right about what we believed about the opposite sex and relationships.

This isn’t the only way we prove that what we believe is right, though. We also prove we’re right by interpreting whatever is happening in such a way that we confirm that our belief is true.

If you believe that no one likes you, you’ll interpret the behavior of others as evidence that they don’t like you, even if that isn’t what their behavior really means. Of all the possible interpretations, you’ll pick the one that confirms that you’re right. The other person might be having a bad day. Their behavior might have nothing to do with you. If you believe that no one likes you, though, you’ll pick the interpretation that proves that you’re right and filter out all the others.

If you believe you’ll never be able to make very much money, you’ll interpret whatever happens as evidence that you’re right, even if there are other explanations. You make what seems like a promising investment, but lose your money. “I knew it,” you say to yourself. “I’ll never make any money.” The fact that many wealthy people failed over and over before they finally made their money doesn’t occur to you. Of all possible interpretations, you pick the one that confirms that what you believe is true and you filter out any other interpretations.

Because I believed that no woman would ever put up with me, I would interpret a woman’s behavior as evidence that I was right, even if that wasn’t the reason for her behavior. One time a woman I was dating didn’t show up for a date we’d made, which I, of course, assumed was evidence that she didn’t care about me, and which sent me into an emotional tailspin.

What actually happened, though, had nothing to do with me. She’d been skiing in the mountains about 60 miles from the city where I live, and her car had broken down. In this pre-cell phone era she had no way to contact me until she finally got home late that night, long after our meeting time. Believing what I did, I interpreted her failure to show up as evidence that my belief about women was true, even though there was another interpretation.

Finally, the third way we prove the truth of what we believe is by acting in a way that makes it come true. If you believe you won’t be loved, you’ll act in such a way that eventually the other person will stop loving you.

If you believe you’ll never make money, you’ll unconsciously take actions that will ensure that you’re right. You’ll fail to do what those who do make money do. You’ll fail to fully evaluate a potential investment, or you’ll talk yourself out of doing something that’s essential or talk yourself into doing something that will sabotage your efforts. If you believe you aren’t smart, you’ll unconsciously do what you need to do to prove that you’re right—you won’t study, you won’t do your homework, or you’ll make yourself anxious or confused whenever you’re in a learning situation (which, you might remember from a previous post, you do by focusing on what you don’t want).

In my own case, I attracted women who were predisposed to not be able to tolerate me, and I often misinterpreted their actions as evidence that they didn’t love me. I also acted in a way that caused them eventually to say, “Okay, you’re right. I can’t tolerate you.” Then, once again, I’d get to be right.

I wish it wasn’t true, but it’s a cruel fact of human nature that we’d rather be right about what we believe than be happy. Of course in order to do this to yourself you have to do it unconsciously, since you can only do what isn’t resourceful if you do it without awareness.

I’ve said that most of life is a process of arranging to be right about what you believe. If this seems far-fetched to you, remember that we do this automatically and unconsciously, without seeing that we do it. Live with awareness, and this problem disappears. Unfortunately, few people are aware. In order to become more aware, my suggestion is to meditate daily, preferably with Holosync, and to begin a process of observing your own internal processes.

So, as I’ve said, you can only do something that does not serve you if you do it without awareness. If you believe something without examining it, assuming that it must be true because of all the evidence you’ve accumulated, you’ll just unconsciously continue to create even more evidence.

But if you begin to observe the internal processes that create your experience of life, and you see how your beliefs (which are just a collection of internal representations about a certain subject) directly create certainly feelings, certain interpretations of what is happening, and certain actions, and that beliefs also causes you to attract or be attracted to certain people and situations, that awareness will cause any belief that does not serve you to fall away. A resourceful belief—one that serves you—will remain. Those that don’t serve you, as you see how they create negative outcomes, will fall away.

When I was operating unconsciously in relationships, the world seemed to be full of women who, once they got to know me, couldn’t tolerate being around me. I assumed that all women would see me this way. Women who might have appreciated me were invisible to me, or unappealing, and they didn’t notice me or find me attractive, either. In my mid-thirties, though, I saw how my belief about women was creating what was happening in my life. The next time I started dating someone, I wanted to see exactly how I was proving that no woman would ever be able to put up with me.

There’s a key principle at work here that I want to make sure you get, because it applies to your life, too. Your feelings, behaviors, and what and whom you attract into your life are generated by something you do inside that three and a half-pound universe between your ears. What happens in your life doesn’t just happen. Yes, the circumstances you were born into play a role in your life, as do your genetics. But the role they play is minor compared to what happens in your mind. Become aware of how your mind creates your life and you can overcome your genetics and your circumstances. Many people have.

In my own case, I believed that no woman would ever be able to put up with me. This involved a set of internal representations—most of which were about what I did not want. In making these internal representations I was unintentionally giving my mind an instruction to prove that my belief was true. My own largely unconscious thought-processes were generating the negative outcomes I was experiencing with women. Who I attracted, how I behaved, and what I felt, were all coming from something I was doing.

I wasn’t doing this on purpose. I didn’t even know I was doing it. Though it was all happening unconsciously, on autopilot, it was still coming from me, from something I was doing. I was just doing it unconsciously. This is why awareness is so important. If what you’re doing to create your life is happening unconsciously, you’ll keep doing it without even knowing that you’re doing it. Do it with awareness, however, and you gain the power to do something about it. You gain choice.

This is the real meaning of taking responsibility. When you realize that most of what happens to you, and all of your response to what happens, comes from certain things you do inside, you can then begin to figure out how you’re doing it. As you do that, you create choice about what previously seemed to “just happen.”

As I watched how I was proving that I was right about relationships, I began to see what I was doing inside my head and how it directly created how I felt and how I acted. I also saw the red flags I’d rationalized away in other relationships. I clearly saw how, with the help of the woman I was with, I was indeed proving, once again, that no woman would ever put up with me. She, on her side, was also busy proving what she believed about herself, about men, and about relationships. We were both proving, through our relationship, that we were right about what we believed.

As I watched, I became fascinated. Within a short time—a few weeks—I just couldn’t keep doing what I’d done in all the other relationships. I was experiencing the truth of something I shared with you earlier, that you can’t do something that doesn’t serve you and do it with awareness. As I watched how I was proving that I was right, my enthusiasm for the relationship diminished, whereas in other relationships I’d just tried harder when things started to go sideways. Once I clearly saw what I was doing I just couldn’t keep doing it so, as gracefully as possible, I ended the relationship.

Then, to my complete surprise, I began to attract and become attracted to a completely different kind of woman. I also began to act differently in relationships. To my amazement, I began attracting women who were predisposed to like me. Instead of spending all my time trying to convince a woman that I cared about her and that my intentions were good, I was attracting women who just assumed that this was the case. I had changed my entire relationship dynamic by becoming aware of what I believed and observing myself as I believed it.

The recurring problems in your life happen because you’re unconsciously proving that you’re right about something. As long as you keep doing this, you’ll keep getting the same results. But if you figure out what belief is generating these recurring negative outcomes and watch yourself to see how you’re doing it, the negative outcomes will fall away and be replaced by something more resourceful.

So, as before, we’re back to awareness. Awareness, it turns out, is the answer to all the problems of life. When you become aware of something you’re doing that doesn’t serve you, it falls away.

All you have to do to create positive change is carefully watch what you’re doing in that creative part of your mind. And you don’t need will power to stop doing what doesn’t serve you because if you’re really aware what doesn’t serve you will fall away all by itself. Just as you don’t need will power to eat when you’re hungry, you don’t need will power to stop doing what doesn’t serve you. You just need awareness.

Let me say once again, though, that awareness is not the same as knowing something. Knowing may help you determine what to pay attention to, but knowing, by itself, won’t create positive change. You might know that you lose your temper, overeat, lose money whenever you invest, or attract partners you have trouble getting along with. Knowing, however, doesn’t cause you to stop doing these things, as you’ve probably already discovered.

To create change you need to see how you do these things. You need to know how your mind creates your feelings and behaviors, and how it causes you to attract or be attracted to certain people and situations—and then watch yourself do it, with awareness. You need to see what you’re doing, and also see the results created by what you’re doing.

There are a couple of reasons why most people have trouble creating these kinds of changes. First, they don’t know where to look. Quite likely no one has pointed out to you that your internal cognitive processes create your feelings, your behaviors, and what and whom you attract. Second, these internal processes zoom by very quickly and for most people are entirely unconscious. It takes work, persistence, and awareness to watch your mind in the way I’m suggesting.

This is why meditation, especially Holosync meditation, is crucial to the process. As you use Holosync, and especially as you progress to the more powerful deeper levels of the program, your awareness continues to increase. As this happens, watching how you create your life becomes increasingly easy.

As you become more aware it becomes increasingly more difficult to create anything in your life, internally or externally, without an aware, witnessing part of you seeing what you’re doing. If you begin to create what doesn’t serve you, that observer—the real you—sees it coming. Once you see what you’re doing, you just can’t keep doing it if it isn’t resourceful.

So here’s the big question: what do you believe about yourself? What do you believe about people, about the world, and about life in general? What are you busy proving that you’re right about, even though you don’t like the results?

It might not seem possible that you could make whatever you believe come true, or at least seem to be true. It might not seem possible to you that what you believe, rather than blind luck, external circumstances, or genetics, could be sabotaging your life. You don’t need to believe me, though. Find out for yourself by looking inside yourself.

So your homework is to make a list of the aspects of your life that aren’t working, and then to figure out what closely held beliefs cause you to generate these unwanted outcomes. Then, watch yourself believe something, as it unfolds. Find out how you create or attract the proof that you’re right about what you believe.

Here is a key principle I’ve discovered:

For any outcome you want, there is a certain way of thinking and acting that will get it for you. You have to find that way of thinking and acting, and be willing to adopt it.

Whatever is happening in your life right now is the result of your current way of thinking and acting. As long as you continue to think and act in the same way, you’ll continue to get the same results. To get different results, you’re going to have to adopt a different way of thinking and acting. It’s as simple as that.

Part of your current way of thinking is the internal representations you make in each moment. A second part involves the various aspects of yourself you’ve disowned and pushed into the basement of your consciousness. Still another is what you believe about yourself, about people, and about the world. There are others, which I discuss in detail in my Life Principles Integration Process online courses, but these are the basics, plus one more which we’ll look at in my next post.

It might seem that figuring out the most resourceful way to think and act is incredibly complex and difficult. Awareness, however, makes this process easy. You don’t need to analyze your current way of thinking and acting to death in order to figure out what is most resourceful. All you have to do is watch with awareness, which becomes progressively easier as you use Holosync. As you become more aware, apply that awareness to the part of your mind that creates your life. As you watch, what doesn’t work falls away and is replaced by what does work.

Before I let you go, two opportunities for you:

First, I want to remind you to come and be with Zen master Genpo Roshi and me in Los Angeles on March 7th and 8th. Because of the difficult economic times, we are offering a huge discount for this workshop. Those who have attended other workshops we’ve done have described them as “life changing.”

Please do come and spend a weekend with Genpo Roshi and me that is sure to change your life. I want you to be one of the truly resilient ones who make it through tough times easily. Just go to www.centerpointe.com/bigmind to reserve your spot. If you bring a friend you save even more.

Second, my good friend Raymond Aaron has a gift for you. Raymond is an amazing guy and a master at helping people double their income. He even wrote a book, Double Your Income Doing What You Love. Because of my friendship with him, he has agreed to work with you this month for free. Register at www.DoubleYourIncomeCHALLENGE.com to let Raymond work with you. I believe there are some free gifts involved, too—and this offer is good only if you sign up in January.

So until next time, be well.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

If there’s one quality these top teachers share it’s that they’ve developed their awareness.

As difficult as it might be to believe this, you might even say that awareness holds the answer to nearly all personal challenges. Awareness is closely connected with both intuition and creativity. The more aware you are, the more obvious the solution is to any problem, and the more the daily problems and challenges of life automatically sort themselves out.

The less aware you are, the more it can seem as if there is no solution to the challenges in your life—and, the more likely it will be that you’ll unconsciously attract people and situations into your life that you don’t want. Zen master Genpo Roshi once said to me that what you’re unaware of will inevitably be the place in your life where you’re stuck. Becoming more aware, then, is an extremely valuable undertaking.

As I said in my last post, there are two main ways to increase your awareness. One is meditation, and of course I’m partial to Holosync meditation because it’s faster, easier, and actually allows you to meditate more deeply than traditional methods. I meditated in a traditional way for 16 years before I stumbled upon what eventually became Holosync, and though I received a lot of benefit from my years of traditional meditation, I have to say that I experienced more positive change in the first year of Holosync than I did from my entire 16 years of traditional meditation.

Holosync speeds up your growth, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. In addition to being a huge benefit, this is also the main drawback to Holosync (or any kind of deep meditation). When you meditate, or do anything that causes you to open up to aspects of yourself you may have been unaware of—if you see a therapist, or attend a personal growth seminar, for instance—you discover things about yourself that you may not like. We then resist these aspects of ourselves that we don’t like.

Resistance, though, is something you DO, not something that just happens to you. You “do” resistance by making internal representations (internal pictures and internal dialog, for instance) of what you don’t want. When you do this, you feel bad, because internal representations directly create your feeling state. And, to make matters worse, your mind figures out a way to unconsciously attract more of whatever you focus on—in this case, what you’re resisting.

The second way to become more aware of how you’re creating your experience of life is to watch your mind and observe how it works, which was the subject of my previous post. Since the internal representations we make lead directly to our feelings, our behaviors, and which people or situations we attract or become attracted to, becoming aware of how we do that gives us choice. It allows us to stop creating our experience of life automatically, based on the past and, instead, to create our life by choice, in the moment.

Observing your internal representations takes some practice, but it is well-worth learning how to do. So, again, awareness is a major key to living a happier, emotionally peaceful, and successful life.

One of the things that makes awareness more difficult is our tendency to push out of our awareness certain things we think are wrong or inappropriate. Though we sometimes feel better in the short run when we do this, over the long run it creates all kinds of problems. What we repress or push into the basement of our awareness is eventually expressed anyway. Even worse, what we repress or disown is expressed in covert and dysfunctional ways, creating serious problems.

An extreme example might be a straight-laced fundamentalist preacher who is caught having sex with underage church members. In repressing what he thought was his sinful sexuality, he ends up expressing it anyway, but in a covert and dysfunctional manner. This is also an example of how focusing on what we don’t want causes us to create more of it. By focusing on “I don’t want to be a sinner,” the preacher ends up creating or attracting more of what he thinks of as sinful. His sexuality ends up hurting himself and others.

We all repress or disown normal human qualities that we think are wrong or inappropriate. Many of the difficulties we have in life are the result of these disowned parts, which many psychologists refer to as shadows. When repressed, these shadow parts come out in immature and dysfunctional ways. By repressing them, we actually end up creating, attracting, or expressing more of them.

In working with hundreds of thousands of people over several decades, I’ve found that nearly all human unhappiness is connected to disowned or repressed human qualities. If a certain area of your life isn’t working, you can be sure that there is a shadow part involved.

Shadows are areas where we are unaware, and re-owning shadow parts creates more awareness, which gives us more choice. Increased awareness turns out to be the key to making your life better.

In this post I want to share an interesting way to look at this phenomenon, a game we teach all new members of the human race, called The Game of Black and White. As you’ll see, when you become aware of how you play this game, you’ll be able to choose how to play it, and in doing so you’ll eliminate a great deal of the suffering in your life.

In every society there is social agreement about which aspects of us are “wrong” or “bad”. There is, of course, variation from family to family. What one family sees as “wrong” might be okay in another family. Excellence might be a positive quality in one family, while in another the child who excels might be told, “Who do you think you are? Do you think you’re better than other people?”

Whatever our family’s values, we received negative reinforcement when we exhibited certain qualities and positive reinforcement when we exhibited others. We learn that it isn’t safe to express what our family or our culture consider to be negative qualities. To keep ourselves from expressing them, we disowned them, which means that we pushed them into the basement of our consciousness, out of our awareness.

As I said earlier, we don’t ever really get rid of these repressed shadow parts. They leak out anyway, appearing in our life in covert and dysfunctional ways. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that pretty much everything that bothers you in life is the result of your disowning some aspect of life.

Let’s say that for you anger is a bad thing. Because it’s bad, you resist it in others, and you resist it in yourself. However, like a balloon, which when squeezed in one place pops out in another, the anger expresses itself, in one way or another.

Perhaps you’ve made anger wrong or bad because your father’s anger was painful for you when you were small. It also wasn’t safe to show your own anger toward him. He was bigger and stronger and he didn’t like it when you disagreed with him. So, you repressed your anger. You also decided to avoid angry people. After all, you don’t like them. And, they scare you.

Ironically, when you disown anger in this way it becomes a central feature of your life. You see angry people everywhere. And, when you encounter an angry person, you’re strongly (and negatively) affected by him or her. Angry people really bother you, even if you aren’t the one they’re angry with. You’re afraid of them and you’re angry about them.

A person with no anger-related trauma, however, and who therefore has not disowned his or her anger, sees the same angry people—after all, they aren’t invisible—but isn’t triggered by them in the same way you are.

For you, though, life seems to be a constant stream of angry people. How do all these angry people find you? By disowning your own anger, your attention is drawn to the angry people, and you’re less likely to notice or be attracted to people who aren’t angry. Because your father’s anger traumatized you, you’re on the lookout for it, so you can avoid it.

As I’ve said many times, focusing on what you don’t want actually causes you to create or attract more of it. So, even though it’s the last thing you want, you attract angry people. And, when you encounter them, you’re powerfully affected by their anger.

Everyone can plainly see that you have a lot of anger—everyone but you. You, however, don’t acknowledge—or even realize—that you’re angry. You’ve disowned it. It’s a shadow. For you, it’s out there, in others. You don’t see it in yourself. You’re against anger, because it’s such a bad thing.

Ironically, even though you’re against anger, you often express your disowned anger to others in covert and dysfunctional ways. Perhaps you’re late for things you really didn’t want to do, or fail to do what you say you’ll do because you really didn’t want to do it. You may avoid responsibility, make excuses, or blame others. Perhaps you’re “conveniently forgetful.” You might complain a lot, use sarcasm, make cutting jokes about others, or be sullen or stubborn. And so on. In one way or another, your disowned anger is expressed.

In other words, you’re passive-aggressive. You express your anger, but not directly. You can’t express it directly because you’ve disowned it. It’s still there, though. And, in addition to being unpleasant for others, you suffer, too. Your own disowned anger eats at you.

Believe me, I know. Anger was a huge shadow for me before my years with Holosync. Not only did I attract angry people—who really pissed me off—I had so much anger that passive aggression wasn’t enough for me. I lost my temper often, and defended my anger when it was pointed out to me. Those other people were being assholes when they were angry, but I had a good reason.

And, of course, anger isn’t the only thing you could disown and repress. I’ve just been using anger as a common example. You could also disown fear, or selfishness, or thousands of other qualities. You’ll likely disown anything your parents or other authority figures didn’t want you to express: wanting, happiness, sexuality, joy, sadness, aggression, pride, intelligence, the urge to be noticed, neediness, being good at things, feeling like a victim, or thousands of other human feelings and urges.

A positive quality can also be a shadow. When you see a negative quality you’ve disowned, it triggers you in a negative way. When you see a positive quality you’ve disowned—for instance, charisma, kindness, leadership, talent, or intelligence—you’ll put the person who exhibits it on a pedestal. You’ll adore or admire that quality in others, but you won’t see it in yourself. You’ve disowned it.

In fact, it’s a general rule that all qualities—disowned or not—exist in all people. And all of them, no matter how positive or negative they seem, are normal human characteristics.

In the last post I made an extremely important point, that when you’re unaware of something you don’t have choice about it. When you’re unaware of a shadow, you don’t have choice about your emotional reaction to it—you just react. And, you have no choice about how you express that reaction. And, you’ll also attract—unconsciously—a constant stream of people who exhibit the shadow aspect you’ve disowned.

When you become aware of a shadow and re-own it, you have choice over it. You move from unconsciously being it to consciously having it. As I gained awareness of my disowned anger, angry people stopped triggering me, and I stopped attracting so many of them. I still notice them, but now, instead of being triggered, I feel compassion for them. That doesn’t mean I like to be around them, or that I don’t see the harm they sometimes cause—or that I might not intervene if I see an angry person abusing another person.

The difference is in my own emotional state. Angry people no longer throw me into a negative emotional state because I’ve re-owned my own anger. I’ve also stopped expressing anger in covert and dysfunctional ways. Anger, which used to be a huge problem in my life, is now just another normal aspect of being human. It happens now and then, but it doesn’t run my life.

Here’s another key point, and it’s connected to what I said a moment ago—that all qualities capable of being disowned exist in all people. When you re-own a shadow, what seemed to be a negative quality matures into something positive. Immature, reactive anger, for instance, might turn into a mature and reasoned unwillingness to tolerate injustice. Narcissistic selfishness matures into mature self-love. Every shadow has a mature form, and re-owning a shadow allows you to express that quality in a mature and positive way.

Now that you have a basic understanding of shadows, I want to introduce you to a game we teach to every new member of society as soon as they’re old enough to understand it. The game is called The Game of Black and White, and the main rule of the game is that White Must Win. This game is actually about shadows, so let’s take a closer look at it.

To play the Game of Black and White a person first must learn to divide everything in the world into separate things and events. We learn to do this so well that once we’ve learned it we never question whether separate things and events actually exist other than in our mind. Your common sense probably tells you that of course the world is full of separate things and separate events. All you have to do is look around.

But let’s look at this idea more closely, because it has a lot to do with the Game of Black and White, with shadows, and with your own happiness and inner peace.

As soon as you were old enough, your parents taught you the names of things. This gives us the idea, first of all, that there is something called a “thing,” and also that a thing and its name are synonymous. Let’s look at why this actually isn’t an accurate way to see the world—useful, in many ways, but not accurate—and why this way of thinking leads to some basic life problems.

Think of a bee and a flower. The flower is rooted to the ground and the bee buzzes around it. Everyone knows that a bee and a flower are two separate and individual “things.” But are they? You never see flowers unless there are bees, and you never see bees unless there are flowers. They go together. Bees and flowers need each other. They’re one, interconnected, organic system, what a physicist might call a “unified field.” You can’t have bees in isolation, nor can you have flowers in isolation. Bees and flowers exist in relation to each other. In that sense they could be seen as one organism.

Then, of course, there is the soil the flower is planted in, and the bacteria and worms that live in the soil and contribute to the nutrients the flower pulls from the ground. That’s part of the system, too, as is the air, with a certain mixture of gases needed by both the flower and the bee. Of course we also need a planet a certain distance from a certain kind of star, with the right temperature, and the right amount of light, the right amount of air pressure, and the right kind of cosmic rays that allow the flower, the bee, the worms, the bacteria, and so on, to exist and thrive.

And, that star is found in a certain kind of galaxy, which is part of a system of galaxies, and so on and so on. Pretty soon you begin to see that this bee and flower system actually includes everything—that the entire universe is one organic, interconnected system, flowing along like water. Mentally dividing the world into separate things and events has its uses, but those divisions are ideas about reality, not the reality itself. In truth, everything is connected to, and dependent upon, everything else.

Thinking of the world as consisting of separate things is just that—a way of thinking about it. In fact, as philosopher Alan Watts used to say, a “thing” is a “think”—a unit of thought, as much of reality as you decide to get your mind around in a particular moment.

Again, I’m not against dividing things up. In fact, it’s obviously very useful. It’s when we forget that all the divisions are actually made-up, though, that we get ourselves into trouble. In fact, though it might not be obvious to you right now, whatever difficulty you might be having in life can ultimately be traced back to the illusion that the world consists of separate things and separate events. Stick with me here and I’ll explain what I mean.

The next thing I want you to understand is that where we make these divisions is arbitrary. Where a division is made—how things are sliced—is really just a matter of social convention and utility. The divisions we think of as being so real are not intrinsic to reality. They are extrinsic. We add them, from the outside.

Let’s look at an example. How big is the sun? In other words, where does the sun end and something that’s not the sun begin? Usually we say that the sun consists of its visible fire. Once you get past the visible fire, you get into something that isn’t the sun—outer space. But you could also say that the sun consists of the extent of its heat. Doesn’t that make sense, too? By that definition, the Earth is actually inside the sun, and the boundary is somewhere out in space, at the point where there’s no more heat.

But we could also say that the sun consists of the extent of its visible light. Under that definition, the size of the sun extends one light year for every year it has been shining, and it’s becoming larger in every direction at a rate of 186,000 miles every second.

So where the sun ends and something else begins is entirely arbitrary, something agreed upon by social convention. There’s no such thing, in isolation, as “the sun.” Putting a boundary on it, just as with the bee and the flower, is a way of thinking about it, not an intrinsic characteristic. And, in fact, all supposed “things” could be seen in the same way. Your skin could just as well be seen as what connects you to the rest of the world as what divides you from it.

What about separate events? As an example, let’s look at the question of when you began. Was it when your mother gave birth? Maybe. Or, was it at conception? Or maybe it was when you were just an evil gleam in your father’s eye. Or, when your parents were born. Or when their parents were born. In fact, we could keep going back in this way until we get back to Adam and Eve.

So you can see that when an event begins—or ends—is also arbitrary. In reality, everything is one huge, interconnected, multi-dimensional ongoing event, flowing along like water in a river. What we think of as separate events are all connected to each other and all go together, just like the bee and the flower. It might be convenient to chop things into separate things and events, but nothing is really separate from anything else.

So now let’s get back to the Game of Black and White. Once we’ve fallen for the supposed reality of separate things and events, we’re taught to divide those supposedly separate things and events into two basic piles. Some things and events go into the “appropriate,” “good,” or “White” pile, while others go into the “inappropriate” or “bad” or “Black” pile. Then, we bring in the main rule of the game, which, as I said, is that White Must Win.

When White—what we think of as appropriate, desirable, or good—“wins,” we’re happy—at least temporarily. But when what we’ve put in the Black pile seems to win, we feel unhappy, frustrated. If you stop and think about it, most of your life—most of everyone’s life—is about trying to get White to win and trying to avoid having Black win.

Here’s the problem with this game: White can never overcome Black, though we play the game as if it must. Good must overcome evil, we think. Life must overcome death. Having must overcome not having. Happiness must overcome unhappiness. Health must overcome illness. What we want must overcome what we don’t want. Pleasure must overcome pain.

You may have already realized that just as the bee and the flower go together, Black and White also go together. In other words, “good” is defined in terms of “evil.” Without evil, how would you know what is good? Good only makes sense in contrast to evil. In the same way, “having” makes no sense except in terms of, and in relation to, “not having.” Life makes no sense except in terms of death.

The same is true of happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain, health and illness, clarity and confusion, here and not here, light and dark, empty and full, and all the other Black and White pairs of opposites. They’re all defined in terms of each other. And, they all go together. You can’t have one without the other any more than you can have a one-headed coin.

In each case, you wouldn’t know that the White side even existed if it weren’t for the Black side, in the same way that you don’t feel your stomach unless it feels bad, or you don’t experience your eyes unless there are spots in front of them, or something else is wrong with them. Until its opposite comes into play, things are invisible, unimaginable.

Now it’s certainly possible in any given moment to have more of one side of the equation than the other, but you’re never going to totally get rid of the side you don’t want. That would be impossible, in the same way that you can’t have buying without selling, or up without down. Just try to make everything in your house “up.” You can’t, because up and down go together.

You can, though, have more good than bad in your life. This depends, as you might imagine, on how aware you are. Those who are unaware unconsciously attract more of what they don’t want. But you’ll never get rid of one side of any polarity, because both sides go together.

What is more, as I described earlier, where one side of each pair of opposites ends and the other begins is totally arbitrary. Where does up end and down begin? Where does good end and evil begin? In reality, they’re one thing.

(Just as an aside, let me give you the real secret to all metaphysics: opposites look as if they’re completely separate and at odds with each other, when they really go together and depend upon each other for their very existence.)

Any division you make, then, is conceptual, not real, and where the division is made is just a social convention. So, as I said before, it might be useful in some cases to divide things, but to avoid problems you must remember that you’re making it up. All divisions are ideas about reality, but not reality itself.

And please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that you should just passively allow bad things to happen, either to yourself or other people. I am saying, however, that when you make certain things wrong, you disown them in yourself. Then you attract more of them, create bad feelings for yourself, and exhibit these disowned qualities in covert, immature, and dysfunctional ways. And who wants that?

So why am I making such a big deal about dividing things up, and especially about this Game of Black and White? What’s wrong with wanting things to be a certain way? Well, nothing, if you do it gently, but most of us don’t. The truth is that to be here, to be a human being, you’re going to prefer certain things to other things. I’m more concerned about my children than yours. I’m more concerned about my car than yours.

To be human is to want certain things. Without desire you wouldn’t eat or come in out the cold, or procreate, and the whole human race would come to an end. But when you play a really hard version of the Game of Black and White, where White must win, and where you strongly resist what you’ve placed in your Black pile, you set yourself up for suffering.

Why? For one thing, you’ve put yourself in a double-bind, an un-winnable situation, where you’re trying to get rid of or defeat something that can’t be gotten rid of or defeated. What you’re resisting is, first of all, just an idea, and second, can’t be successful resisted anyway, since it’s one side of a coin, and you can’t get rid of it without getting rid of the other side, too.

Disowning a certain aspect of your self—what I’ve called creating a shadow—is a result of playing the Game of Black and White. If you’ve experienced some sort of trauma, what you associate with that trauma will go into your Black pile. You’ll disown it in yourself and dislike it in others. And, unless you’re aware, you’ll focus on avoiding it, which will cause you to attract or create more of it and express it in covert and dysfunctional ways.

The more trauma (fear, anger, shame, disappointment, etc.) you suffered during your childhood, the more likely it will be that you’ll play a hard version of the Game of Black and White—in other words, the more likely it will be that you’ll have a lot of shadows, disowned parts. You could also say that you’ll be more easily pushed over your threshold. This means that you’ll focus on what you don’t want more often—which, if you’ll remember, you do by making internal representations of what you don’t want.

When you focus on what you don’t want, you feel bad, because all bad feelings are caused by focusing on something you don’t want. And, because your mind take what you focus on as an instruction to create or attract more of it, you’ll unconsciously attract or create MORE of what you think is Black, more of your shadow, more of what you don’t want.

If your father frequently yelled at you and then spanked you when you were small, this was probably a traumatic experience. If, in the present, another authority figure—your boss, for instance—yells at you, it’s very likely that you’ll mentally attach the traumatic memory, particularly the negative emotions, to your boss. You’ll drag the past trauma—or rather, your idea of it—into the present and associate it with your boss. When he yells, you’ll feel the same fear you felt as a child.

Authority figures, then, particularly those with more aggressive personalities, are part of your Black pile. Focusing on avoiding them causes you to feel bad. It also causes you to do subtle things, outside your awareness, that actually attracts them into your life and draws their attention to you.

Even worse, if authority figures are a shadow for you, you’ll exhibit the same qualities you don’t like in authority figures, but in a covert and dysfunctional way. You might be bossy, stubborn, arbitrary, controlling, merciless, or opinionated. These qualities will come out in covert and dysfunctional ways, and everyone will see them—except you.

If you re-own this shadow part (in other words, if you acknowledge that like all humans you have these qualities in yourself, and stop playing such a hard version of the Game of Black and White around authority figures), the immature version of these negative qualities will mature into something else—leadership, perhaps, or wisdom, or mentorship.

What causes you to re-own a shadow part—or, you might say, take a particular game-piece off the game board in the Game of Black and White—is awareness. As long as you are unaware, this entire dynamic will operate on autopilot, and you’ll suffer the consequences. Genpo Roshi’s Big Mind process, where you allow a disowned voice to speak, is an effective way of re-owning a shadow part of yourself, which is one reason why I’ve strongly encouraged you to attend one of our workshops.

When you speak from a disowned voice, you become aware of it. Once you become aware—once you’re able to see how your shadow expresses itself, internally and externally—this awareness causes it to mature. You stop expressing it in a dysfunctional way and begin to express it in a mature way (since all voices exist in all people, you will express it—you might as well express it in a mature way).

As I said in my last post, you can only do something that isn’t resourceful if you do it unconsciously, without awareness. When you become aware of something you are doing—when you are able to observe it as it happens and see the consequences, as they happen—it becomes very difficult to keep doing it if it doesn’t serve you.

Also remember that awareness is not the same as merely knowing something. Awareness is watching the actual creation and seeing the consequences as they happen. Knowing is just an intellectual activity. Knowing is the booby prize in personal growth.

I would suggest that you spend some time discovering some of the key shadow elements in your life, so you can re-own them. Or, to put it another way, to identify the major aspects of life you’ve assigned to the Black pile in the Game of Black and White, and to begin to notice how you play the game. That awareness will cause you to re-own the disowned parts. In the language of the Game of Black and White, you’ll stop playing such a hard version of the game around certain aspects of your life.

So sit down and make a list of the “negative” qualities that really trigger you emotionally when you experience them in others. You might be triggered when someone else is sloppy, stupid, dishonest, sexually perverted, selfish, conceited, angry, stubborn, controlling, disorganized, critical, unreliable, show-off, etc. What really bugs you in other people? List these, then put them in order, with those that trigger you the most at the top of the list.

You might also create a list of the main qualities you have in your “White pile”—what you think of as good, desirable, and appropriate—and those qualities you’ve assigned to your “Black pile”—what you think of as bad, undesirable, and inappropriate.

Then, take each quality that triggers you (or each quality you’ve put in the Black pile) and speak from it, either out loud or in writing. See what that disowned part has to say. Let it out of the basement so it can express itself. If you’ve disowned being a victim, let the victim in you speak. Everyone feels like a victim once in a while, so let the victim speak. Whatever the disowned voice is, it has something to say, and allowing it to speak gives you awareness about it. And with awareness comes choice.

When you do this, the areas of life where you tend to experience a lot of bad feelings, or where you repeatedly experience outcomes you don’t like, will shift. Believe me, this is possible, and when it happens, it will blow your mind. The positive change in your life will be huge, I promise. As I’ve done this in my own life, I’ve changed in ways I never could have imagined. Negative feelings and outcomes I’d lived with for decades faded away. My sense of well-being increased tremendously. Decades later it still continues to increase.

The same thing can happen for you.

Before I go, I want to remind you to come and be with Zen master Genpo Roshi and I in Los Angeles on March 7th and 8th. Because of the difficult economic times, we are offering a huge discount for this workshop. Those who have attended the others we’ve done have described them as “life changing.”

Though we seem to be facing tough and challenging times, and you may not be able to do a lot about that, you can do something about your response to what is happening around you. The two things I’ve found to be most powerful in allowing a person to remain happy and peaceful regardless of external circumstances are Holosync and Genpo Roshi’s Big Mind process.

Please do come and spend a weekend with Genpo Roshi and I that is sure to change your life. I want you to be one of the truly resilient ones who make it through tough times easily. Just go to www.centerpointe.com/bigmind to reserve your spot. If you bring a friend you save even more.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

I’ve been helping people with their personal and spiritual growth for over 30 years now, and I’ve noticed that these three areas—how you feel, how you behave, what people and situations you attract or become attracted to, and what meanings you assign to the people, things, and events in your life–make up most of our experience of life.

Most people assume that their feelings “just happen,” that feelings come and go without much if any choice on our part. For that reason, most people assume that there’s little that can be done about their moment by moment feelings. Have you ever lost your temper, despite the negative consequences, or found yourself feeling sad or depressed without being able to get yourself out of it?

As I’ll explain in a moment, you actually can exercise a great deal of choice over how you feel. There’s no reason why you need to feel bad for more than a few moments, but exercising this choice involves becoming more aware of exactly how you’re creating the way you feel in each moment. Meditation have proven to be one of the most effective ways of increasing awareness and Holosync meditation increases awareness at least four times faster than traditional mediation. Either way, it’s through increasing your awareness that you can take charge of your internal experience of life–and your external results.

I also frequently hear from people who say that they know what they need to do in order to get the results they want, but they often can’t get themselves to actually take the actions they know they need to take. They attend a seminar on how to make money, where they learn a step by step formula. They go home motivated and excited, but despite their best intentions fail to put it into practice. Or, they learn about relationship communication skills, but when the chips are down and they really need to use those skills, for some reason they don’t use them.

Why does this happen? Why are we sometimes unable to be in charge of how we behave? I want to explore this question, too. And, as you’ll see, once again the key to success is increasing your conscious awareness.

Let me ask you something else. Are there areas of life where you seem to get the same negative result over and over, no matter how hard you try? I used to get involved with the same woman, but each time in a different body, over and over. Then I’d experience the same relationship issues and have the same fights and the same bad feelings that I’d had with the previous partner.

Somehow, out of all the available women in the world, I managed to choose—and be chosen by—women with the same issues, which meant that each new relationship had the same problems as the old one (of course, I had my own issues). This doesn’t just happen in relationships, though. Some people make one bad investment after another, or get involved in one bad job after another, or makes the same bad decision over and over.

If you have a recurring problem in any area of life—making money, attracting friends, getting people to respect you, creating fulfilling relationships, finding work you enjoy, staying healthy, or if anything else you don’t like seems to happen over and over—there’s a reason why this happens. Most people, without knowing how and why, repeatedly attract certain situations and people, which causes them to experience similar results, again and again. As with feelings and behaviors, awareness is, once again, the key to discovering why this happens and being able to exercising the choices that create new and better outcomes.

As you know if you’re using it, meditating with Holosync creates a number of positive changes. The first thing most people notice is that it feels good when you use it, and you feel pleasantly high when you’re finished. This is because when you are in deep, meditative states your brain produces a number of pleasurable neurochemicals that make you feel good. Many people also notice over the first several months that people and situations that bothered them before, that created anger or anxiety or some other emotional reaction, don’t seem to trigger them in the same way. You could say that the threshold at which they become triggered by people and situations increases.

At the same time, general feelings of well-being increase, and anger, depression, anxiety, and other dysfunctional feelings begin to diminish. Emotional health, what some psychologists call E.Q., increases. What’s more, mental clarity, creativity, problem solving ability, and other mental abilities increase because Holosync use causes the creation of new neural pathways between the left and right brain hemispheres, leading to more effective whole brain thinking (a component of awareness, by the way)

I want to add, however, that sometimes using Holosync might not feel good. Holosync pushes you to grow, and sometimes your unconscious mind may push back. In other words, you might resist on an unconscious level and, in doing so, create some uncomfortable feelings. So if your experience isn’t all “positive,” don’t worry. When it feels uncomfortable, something big is being worked through, and the benefits of doing that are huge. If you feel uncomfortable, call our support line and have a chat with one of the support coaches.

What drives the accelerated change process Holosync users experience is the increase in awareness created by Holosync. So what do I mean by “awareness”? Interestingly, this isn’t something that’s woo-woo or metaphysical, though some people like to see it that way. Let me give a few examples.

In many ways life can be seen as a step-by-step process of becoming more aware. Some people continue to become more aware throughout their entire life, while others gain a certain amount of awareness and then do something to stop the process. Those who continue to become more aware throughout life can in some cases become so aware that they’re capable of quite startling mental abilities, they gain incredible inner peace, and their perspective on life is significantly broader than that of other people. This process culminates in what some people would call spiritual enlightenment, which isn’t the sort of woo-woo thing you might think it is, and doesn’t involve any particular belief system.

This process of becoming more aware actually begins when you’re a baby, and we’ve all experienced it. Developmental psychologists tell us that a baby is having what is often described as an experience of oceanic oneness. What this really means is that the baby can’t tell the difference between me and not-me. To the baby it’s all one thing. The baby isn’t yet aware enough to notice that there is something called “me,” and then there is everything else. But at some point the baby bites its toes and it hurts, and then he bites his blanket and notices that it doesn’t hurt. In this way, the baby makes the distinction between me and not-me.

At this point the baby is a bundle of sensory experiences and motor activities, but without any awareness that it can direct these things or have control over them. But at a certain point the baby gains enough awareness of its motor responses and sensory experiences that it can intentionally look at a certain thing, or listen to a certain sound. It also learns that instead of moving randomly it can move intentionally. It can roll over, or reach out for a toy, or kick its legs, and do these things intentionally.

This demonstrates one of the key points I want you to understand, which is that awareness creates more choice and more control. You have no choice or control over that which you are unaware of. Once you become aware of something, however, you have choice over it. You can exercise some amount of control. Once the baby realizes that it can move intentionally, or intentionally direct its senses, it begins to have control over these things.

At this point the child becomes a bundle of feelings, of internal sensations. At some point, though, the child gains awareness of these feelings, and begins to name them. “I’m happy.” “I’m sad,” and so forth. This again, gives a measure of control. The same thing happens with thoughts a bit later in development. As the ability to think develops, the child is at first unaware of its thoughts. They happen, but there isn’t enough awareness for the child to say, “I’m having certain thoughts.” Once this awareness happens, however, the child is able to think intentionally, to decide to think about a certain subject. Often this happens about the time the child is ready to go to school.

We could continue to go through the various developmental signposts all the way into adulthood, but I think I’ve made my point, which is that we progressively become aware of aspects of ourselves, and of the outside world, as we grow up. As this happens, and to the degree it happens, we gain more choice and control over what we’ve become aware of. I’ve written extensively about this subject on this blog, and if you’d like to go into it more deeply, go the beginning of the blog and read my series on human development.

I started by asking you how your life would change if you had more choice about how you feel, how you behave, and the kinds of people and situations you attract or become attracted to. Now, I’ve added the key point that we have choice and control over those things we are aware of. I’ve also made the second point that Holosync increases your ability to become aware.

Before I describe in more detail exactly what I mean by awareness, there’s one other thing you need to know about this process. Sometimes when a person is making a developmental shift in which they’re becoming aware of something of which they were previously unaware, something goes wrong. Author Ken Wilber has called these junctures developmental fulcrums. We don’t have time to delve into this deeply right now, but if something goes wrong during these developmental shifts, if they aren’t made cleanly and fully, certain mental and emotional problems can happen, including neurosis, personality disorders, and even psychosis. We have trouble making these developmental shifts when some sort of trauma happens during the shift.

Perhaps we’ll explore this in a future post, but here’s the key point I want to make right now: Wherever you are in this developmental process—and I didn’t by any means describe the entire sequence of stages (again, see the series of posts on this blog about human development for the full story)—you are unaware of something. And, being unaware of it, you don’t have choice about it or control over it. If you do become aware of it, whatever it is, you begin to be able to exercise choice over it. Those aspects of your life that you don’t seem to be able to exercise choice over represent some part of yourself that you are unaware of.

As you become aware of how your feelings are created, then, you gain control and choice over those feelings. As you become aware of how your behaviors are generated, you gain choice and control over your behaviors. As you become aware of how you attract or become attracted to certain people and situations, you gain choice and control over that process.

Let me give an example to help you better understand what I mean. You may from time to time experience feelings you don’t like—sadness, anger, anxiety, depression, confusion, overwhelm, and so forth. These feelings seem to be caused by external events–or they sometimes seem to just happen, out of the blue. The truth is that while outside events often provide the trigger for the emotions we experience, what actually happens is more complicated. When a certain event happens (when we have an experience), we respond by doing certain things inside, in our mind, and it’s these internal cognitive processes that actually create our emotional responses.

If you’re like 99% of people, these processes happen almost entirely outside of your awareness. As you become aware of these processes, and begin to see how they create your moment by moment feelings, you will achieve an increased amount of choice over how you feel.

These internal cognitive events include the internal pictures we make, most of which happen outside our awareness. They also include our internal dialog, what most people would call “thinking,” much of which also takes place outside our awareness. These processes also include what we believe, what we’ve decided is important, as well as ways we have of deciding what to pay attention to and what to delete from our awareness.

The pictures you make in your head and what you say to yourself are part of a category of internal processes called internal representations. As we experience life, in order to understand and make sense of it, we represent what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell to ourselves, inside our mind. What’s more, these internal representations directly create how you feel, so I hope you can see that if you become more aware of them, you’ll have more choice about them, which leads to more choice about how you feel.

This provides a clue to what I mean when I use the word awareness. Awareness, in this case, is your ability to observe your internal representations as they happen and to see how they directly lead to how you feel in each moment. As you use Holosync, in addition to all the other benefits of increased mental clarity and a greater sense of well-being, you’ll also gain more awareness of your internal representations.

Internal representations can be divided into two main categories: those of what you want and those of what you don’t want. In other words, when you think about (i.e., create internal representations of) some area of life, you could either picture what you want in that area, or what you want to avoid. If you’re thinking about money, you could picture having a lot of it, or how to become rich. Or, you could picture not having any, or how to avoid being poor.

This is where it begins to get interesting. When you make internal representations of what you want, several things happen. First, you generally feel good. What’s more, you tend to get ideas about how to get what you want. You also tend to notice resources that might enable you to get what you want. You’re also more likely to feel motivated to take action to get what you want. And, you’re more likely to develop the personal qualities you might need to get what you want—such things as persistence, creativity, enthusiasm, imagination, courage, and so forth.

On the other hand, when you make internal representations of what you don’t want (i.e., what you want to avoid, what you’re worried about, or what you’re afraid might happen) you feel bad. In fact, any time you have a bad feeling of any kind, you can be sure that you are making internal representations of something you don’t want. And, even though you don’t want it, your mind takes the internal representation as something to attract or create more of, and just as with internal representations of what you want, it figures out a way to make it happen.

So, here’s the way it works. You see something, hear something, touch something, and so forth. You have an experience. This experience triggers you to make certain internal representations. In fact, you make internal representations continuously, all day long. It’s your way of making sense of what happens around you. Then, as a direct result of the internal representations you make, you experience a certain internal state—you feel something. This includes emotions, such as happiness, sadness, anxiety, and so forth, and it also includes states such as motivation, courage, enthusiasm, and so on, that aren’t exactly emotions.

The way most people think it works:
External event –> Your experience of life

The way it actually works:
External event –> your internal pictures and internal dialog –> Your experience of life

So though it seems as if the external events in your life create how you feel, the truth is that there’s a hidden step between the external event and your experience of it—and this step is the internal representations you make in response to the external event. As long as you’re unaware of this step—the internal representations you make—you won’t be able to exercise choice over them and you won’t have any choice over the feelings and other internal states they generate. But once you become aware of this intervening step, and you directly see how the internal representations you make create your feelings, you will have choice, and you will gain increased control over your internal state.

You can demonstrate to yourself how making internal representations of what you want creates good feelings, and how making internal representations of what you don’t want creates bad feelings. Right now, stop and think of a situation when you were extremely happy or when something went extremely well for you. Perhaps it was a time when you got something you really wanted, or a time when you successfully did something you really wanted to do. Once you’ve thought of such a situation, go back to that time, in your memory, and step right into your body, in your imagination, and see what you saw, hear what you heard, and feel what you felt. Really get into it (you’ll have to stop reading for a moment in order to do this, so read the rest of the instructions first).

As you reexperience that situation, notice what you are feeling. That feeling is created by the internal representations (pictures and internal dialog) you’re making. Because they are of something you want, something you consider to be positive, it’s very likely that the feeling will be a good feeling. (Go ahead and do this little internal experiment now.)

Now, let’s do this same exercise with a negative event. Think of a situation where something did not go well, an unpleasant or negative event. As before, go back to that time in your memory and, in your imagination, see what you saw, hear what you heard, and feel what you felt. Again, notice what you are feeling, and notice that that feeling is connected to the internal representations you made of what you don’t want.

Now, rather than leaving you in that negative state, let’s do something to get you out of it. Ask yourself, ”If this this is what I did not want, then what did I want?” Picture what you wanted in that situation. This will cause you to make internal representations of what you want, and this will quite likely create a better feeling. (Go ahead and do this little thought experiement now.)

If you really did this little mental exercise you should be able to see that when you focus on what you want, you create positive feelings, and when you focus on what you don’t want, you create negative feelings. It’s not what happens “out there” that creates how you feel so much as it’s what you do inside in response to what happens out there. The problem is that nearly all people focus (in other words, create internal representations) in response to what happens unconsciously.

I often summarize what we do at Centerpointe in a very simple way. We have a tool that increases awareness—Holosync. Then, we show those who use Holosync how to apply this additional awareness to that part of themselves that generates their experience of life (their internal processes). This creates a dramatic shift in your ability to create what your want in life–and how you experience what you get.

I hope you can see by now that if the way you generate your internal representations runs on autopilot, which it does for nearly all people, it will seem as if a lot of your life just happens to you. The solution to this is to become aware of and take charge of those internal processes, which gives you choice and control.

But why do some people seem to make a lot of internal representations of what they don’t want? In other words, why do some people focus a lot on what they are afraid of, what they are worried about, what they want to avoid? Such people, unfortunately, feel bad a lot and tend to attract or create more of what they are focusing on—what they don’t want. In fact, I’ll make a blanket statement here: if there is an area of your life that isn’t working very well, you can be sure that in that area of life you are, more often than not, focusing on—in other words, making internal representations of—what you don’t want.

If you have trouble making money, you’ll find that you are making a lot of internal representations of what you don’t want regarding money. If you have trouble making friends, you’ll find that in that area of life you’re focusing on what you don’t want–not having friends, being alone, etc. Any area of life that’s chronically problematic for you, if you look inside, you’ll find that when you think about that area of life you’re focusing on what you don’t want. Those who focus on what they want in a given area of life tend to be successful in that area of life, all other things being equal. Those who focus on what they don’t want in a certain area of life have trouble.

Again, the big problem is that almost all people focus unconsciously, outside their awareness.

So why would someone chronically focus on what he or she doesn’t want? If, during your childhood, you are traumatized in some way, you will develop an underlying belief that the world is a dangerous place, or at least a potentially dangerous place. To avoid that danger, then, it makes sense that you would want to watch out for it. But to watch out for danger (whatever the anticipated danger is, whether it’s mental, emotional, or physical) you have to focus on it. In other words, you have to make internal representations of what you don’t want. This causes two outcomes. It creates bad feelings, and it also tells your mind to figure out a way to create or attract MORE of it.

Let me introduce another basic principle. You can create negative feelings and negative outcomes ONLY if you do so unconsciously. If you focus on what you don’t want with awareness, however, and clearly see exactly how you’re creating bad feelings and negative outcomes, you won’t be able to keep doing it.

To create negative outcomes, then, whether internal or external, the internal representations that create them have to happen outside your awareness. In other words, you have to fail to notice that additional internal second step. Once you become aware of what you’re doing–once you actually see the internal representations you’ve been (unconsciously) making, and see the direct connection between these internal representations and what happens in your life–you’ll stop making them. As I said earlier, awareness gives you choice, and no one with a choice would choose to create bad feelings or negative outcomes (there is one exception to this, which I will address in a future post).

For many years I’ve written about the fact that each person has an emotional threshold for what they can handle. When you’re under your threshold you feel pretty good. It feels as if your life is under control. But if events push you over your threshold, you begin to feel bad, overwhelmed, anxious. It starts to feel as if life is out of control.

Here is a key point for you to consider. Your experiences, and certainly your response to your experiences, don’t “just happen” to you. Your experiences—how you feel in each moment, how you behave, and the people and situations you attract or become attracted to—are something you DO. Right now that “doing,” if you’re like 99% of people, happens unconsciously. What you do inside, in that second step—generates your internal and your external response to everything that happens.

So, knowing this, if I feel overwhelmed, if I feel like I’m over my threshold, I start thinking, “Okay, how am I DOING feeling overwhelmed?” The feeling of overwhelm doesn’t “just happen”—there’s something I DO that creates it. I DO feeling overwhelmed by focusing, in some way, on what I don’t want. Once I see how I’m doing it, I just can’t keep doing it to myself, and the internal representations of what I don’t want fall away and are replaced with internal representations of what I want.

So when you are under your threshold, you’re feeling pretty good, because you’re focusing on what you want for the most part. When you reach your threshold for what you can handle, you begin to focus on what you don’t want, what you’re worried about, what you’re afraid of, what you want to avoid. So your threshold is the point where you begin to focus on what you don’t want.

You may have noticed that some people have high thresholds, while others have lower thresholds. If you have a low threshold, the events of life are much more likely to push you over it, and you’ll feel bad more often. You’ll be more reactive to life. You’ll more easily lose your equanimity, your emotional balance. You also can’t think effectively and clearly when over your threshold, so you’re more likely to make bad decisions or have trouble dealing with challenging situations. On the other hand, if your threshold is high, it will take more to push you over it. You’ll remain content and centered in situations where others with lower thresholds may become upset. And your ability to think clearly and deal with challenging situations will be better.

So why would a person have a low threshold? If a person is traumatized, usually during childhood, his or her threshold will not mature properly. Such a person is often left with a lower threshold, and is much more likely to be triggered into bad feelings by the events of everyday life. They might more easily become sad, angry, anxious, confused, overwhelmed, or depressed, for instance. The greater the trauma, the lower the threshold.

If your threshold is low, however, all is not lost. Holosync use pushes your threshold higher. In other words, it increases how much you can deal with before you start focusing on what you don’t want. And, Holosync raises your threshold by creating more conscious awareness. On a neurophysiological level, it does this by creating new neural pathways between the left and right hemispheres of your brain, which increases your perspective and your ability to see more, and also by opening the spigots of several key neurochemicals that also increase your awareness. My threshold was quite low when I started using Holosync. I was extremely reactive emotionally. Now, my threshold is very high. And, I’ve seen the same change happen to every person who has used Holosync on an ongoing basis.

This increase in threshold when you use Holosync is very similar to what happens when you exercise, which pushes your physical threshold higher. Notice that whether the threshold we’re pushing against is emotional, as with Holosync, or physical, as with exercise, this pushing is stressful. It’s a positive stress, one that makes you emotionally or physically stronger, but still it’s a stress.

You’ll notice also that when Holosync pushes against your threshold in the process of pushing it higher, it can feel uncomfortable–though it doesn’t have to. When Holosync pushes you to your threshold, your tendency will be to focus on what you don’t want, because that’s what people tend to do when they’re at or over their threshold. This is the real reason why it can feel uncomfortable—focusing on what you don’t want always creates some sort of uncomfortable state, some sort of bad feeling.

However, if you’re watching, and you notice that you’re feeling bad in some way, that you’re experiencing some sort of discomfort, you can choose to switch your focus to what you want. Or, you can just stand aside and observe, with no agenda for what does or does not happen. This latter response we call witnessing, and it means to watch with no agenda, as if you were just curiously observing someone else. “Hmm. There I am, feeling a bit distressed. Interesting.”

So let’s review. I introduced the idea that how you feel, how you behave, and what people and situations you attract or become attracted to are actually generated by something you do inside, the internal representations you make. I also told you that when you’re aware of something (as opposed to doing it unconsciously), you have a choice about it, you have control over it. When you’re unaware, when what you’re doing happens outside your awareness, you don’t have choice or control. So in terms of creating what you want in life, the name of the game is awareness. If you can become aware of the internal processes that generate your experience of life, you’ll have choice.

Holosync creates this awareness–in fact, quite dramatically–and most of what I write about (and my three online courses in particular) is designed to teach you how to focus that increased awareness on what you’re doing to create your experience of life.

The next distinction I made is that in the broadest sense the internal representations you make are either of what you want or what you don’t want. Bad feelings are created by internal pictures and internal dialog of what you don’t want, what you’re worried about, what you’re afraid of, or what you want to avoid. When you feel good, it’s because you’re focusing on what you want (in other words, making internal pictures of and internal dialog about what you want).

One key, then, to mastering your life is to become aware of your internal representations, and particularly whether they are of what you want or what you don’t want. That awareness creates choice, and that choice will allow you to feel good most, or even all, the time.

I want to make one more key distinction before we close. There is a big difference between merely knowing something and being aware of it. Most people who’ve been involved in personal growth for any time know quite a bit about their issues, their “stuff.” Knowing about it, however, though a good first step, won’t make your issues go away.

Let’s say that you often feel uneasy in social situations. You’ve known this for years, in fact. You may have discovered that certain events from your childhood affected your self esteem and that this lack of self esteem is connected to your uneasy feelings in social situations. Despite all that knowledge, though, you still feel uncomfortable in social situations.

If, however, you’re able to look inside and notice that in social situations you make internal representations of what you don’t want—not looking foolish, not being rejected, not feeling left out, or whatever—and you also see how these internal representations directly create your feeling of uneasiness, it will become very difficult to keep making those internal representations. You just can’t do something that isn’t resourceful and do it with awareness.

This also brings up one more key point. It isn’t what happened in the past that matters, as long as you’re aware. What matters is what you do now—in this case, what internal representations you make in the present. If you’re unaware, if your internal representations are happening automatically, your past will matter. Why? Because you’ll automatically make internal representations of avoiding more of the dangers you experienced in childhood—in this example, rejection. But if you are aware, and you see what you’re doing that creates your experience—not knowing what you’re doing, but actually seeing it happen—you won’t be able to keep doing it, because it isn’t resourceful.

There’s a lot of talk in personal growth circles about being in the now moment. As with everything else, being in the now moment is something you DO, not something that just happens. And the way you do being in the now moment is by being aware. And a big part of that is being aware of the internal representations you’re making and what they create. This ability, which, with practice, can be developed, is the modern equivalent to the yogic powers masters of the Far East are said to demonstrate. What has been referred to as “mind control” is really “mind awareness.”

Up to now I’ve focused mostly on how you create your feelings and haven’t talked a lot about how you create your behavior, or how you create the people and situations you attract or become attracted to. We’ll get into this in another post. I’ll just say here that your internal state, in a kind of chain reaction, generates these other aspects of your life. But one step at a time.

So here’s what I would like you to do. First, continue to use Holosync, as per the instructions, each day, so you can work on expanding your awareness. If you aren’t yet using Holosync, I would strongly suggest that you begin. It’s certainly possible to become more aware by observing your mind and noticing how it creates your experience of life. But when you do this while using Holosync, it become dramatically easier.

And, if you really want to go into the process of becoming aware of how you create your experience of life, I suggest that you look into my Life Principles Integration Process online courses. You can listen to a free preview lesson at www.centerpointe.com/life/preview.

Before I let you go I want you to know that Zen master Genpo Roshi and I will be doing another workshop in Los Angeles, March 7-8. And, because of the tough economic times, we’ve dramatically lowered the cost (see below).

What happens for people at these workshops is astonishing. If you want to have huge insights into who you really are and why your life is the way it is…if you want to drop some significant unconscious stuff that has been making certain areas of your life not work well…if you’d like to have a stunning experience of transcendent Oneness usually reserved for those who meditate for decades…or if you’d just like to take advantage of the opportunity work directly with me and with a real enlightened Zen master…this is for you.

Those who’ve been to the other workshops we’ve done have raved about what happened for them. Many people tell us that it was the most amazing experience if their entire life. Here are a few comments from people who’ve been to one of these events:

“Hi Bill, I was one of the 220 participants in the two day workshop of Big Mind/Big Heart. I can attest that all you say is true. It is a mind blowing experience, and like the gift that keeps on giving – days after I am still basking in the glow.” –April“I have been in the audience of many wonderful teachers, but nothing in my experience compares with this last weekend. I had no expectations really (except my usual nagging feelings of self doubt i.e. ?I won?t be able to get this,?). I must admit that my mind is still trying to figure out what took place.Its still hard for me to put into words, but I can say the experience and clarity is beyond any doubt. I must truly say that this is THE most extraordinary experience of my life so far.” –Richard

Concerned about the money? I understand. We’ve dropped the tuition for this event by 40% because of the economy and to make it easier for you to afford to be there. The tuition has been $997–and well worth it. We’ve lowered it, though, by $200, and then we’ll also give you another $200 off for early registration if you sign up now. Finally, to make it even more affordable–and even better than 40% off–you can bring another person for half of the regular price (in other words, for $398.50). If two of you split the cost, this means you can both come for just $497.75–half of what other people have paid to be there.

I strongly urge you to give yourself this amazing experience. Just go to www.centerpointe.com/bigmind.

Until next time, be well.

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

First, though I think things could get very bad, the world isn’t going to come to an end. As things get worse, some people WILL say that it’s coming to an end, but when and if you begin to hear that, it will be a signal that things are about to get better. Such comments invariably come when things have gotten as bad as they’re going to get.Second, though it’s tempting to do so, I would avoid finger-pointing and trying to figure out who to blame. Though there are some people who ARE to blame, in other ways this debacle is a universal cultural event, not something caused by mean and greedy people in some smoke-filled back room.

For the entire lifetimes of most people reading this, buying whatever you want, but before you have the money, has been the accepted thing to do. Everyone else seemed to be doing it, and the idea that it might not be the smart thing to do (spend money before you actually have it) just hasn’t occurred to a lot of people.This has resulted in many people ending up in debt, which means you spent tomorrow’s money yesterday. When tomorrow comes, you either have to live on less money, or add MORE debt, which just forestalls the inevitable payback.

To keep the game going, credit markets become more and more leveraged. The bankers did just what they always do, and what the public wanted them to do — they figured out better and better ways to allow people, corporations, and other institutions to buy things before they actually had the money to pay for them. The criteria for who actually had the ability to repay became less and less realistic.

Anyone in the financial industry who didn’t provide this sort of easy credit to people was at a disadvantage, so the game continued until people who had no money were buying houses they couldn’t afford to pay for. No one, though, can live on credit forever, and the chickens are now coming home to roost.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think we’re facing a massive and fundamental change in the way money works in this society, and it’s going to involve a period of tough times. So, what can you do?

First, I would suggest focusing on what you can do to improve your own situation, rather than finding someone to blame, as tempting as it might be. People who feel helpless blame others. Don’t be helpless. If you focus on what you can do, you’ll save yourself a lot of frustration and aggravation. If you like to feel angry and frustrated, then by all means blame everyone in sight.

Next, realize that as things become more uncertain — financially, politically, and in other ways — people will begin to feel helpless. They will feel more isolated and separate. When this happens it’s easier to become more self-involved. Instead of thinking only of yourself, become more aware of other people and their needs. Yes, look for your own opportunities, and then help other people see their opportunities — the positives in their own lives. Become a source of inspiration to others.

Crises feed on fear. Help others to look for the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit that exists even in the worst situations. If you do this, others will look to you for leadership, and your own fortunes will improve in ways you can’t even imagine.

In terms of your finances, search for solutions for your customers or your employer. See the other person’s point of view and figure out a way to solve the problems they face. If you do this, your business will thrive while others are failing. If you are an employee, you’ll have a job when others are being laid off.

My next suggestion is to let go of your attachments to things. Instead, emphasize the value of your relationships. Material things are nice, but life is really about love and friendship. If you have these things, and cultivate them, your life will be more meaningful, no matter what the economic conditions.

From a business perspective, focusing on your relationships will strengthen your ability to survive no matter how bad things get. Sincerely think of the other person and his or her needs. In good times it’s easy to succeed and even the worst-run business can at least make some money. In tough times, those who really care about their customers or their employer, and do their best to discover and meet their needs, succeed while others are failing.

If you’ve lost money, or customers, or a job, instead of focusing on what you’ve lost, focus on potential opportunities and what you can do now. Leave the past in the past, whatever it was, and look to what’s next. And, be willing to be flexible enough to change, to do something different.

Who knows? Perhaps your losses are the doorway to some amazing new endeavor or adventure that will change your life for the better — and which might never have happened if those losses you’ve experienced hadn’t happened. Forget about who you were and begin to dream about who you can be.

I’d also encourage you to get rid of “what if?” thinking. Focus on what you want, and what you can do to get it. There’s no value or benefit in worrying about the future. Yes, think of the potential challenges, but only to help you generate plans and solutions that you can take action on now. If there’s something you can’t do anything about, surrender to it, and then move on.

When something dreadful happens — and it might — move immediately to, “Okay, that has happened. What are my options? What can I do now?” Focusing on what has gone wrong has no value. Focusing on what to do next has great value.

You say you don’t have the tools, resources, or help you need to move ahead? Resolve to do the best with whatever is available. Take action anyway. This will give you confidence, and this additional confidence will allow you to find and utilize additional resources — even when it initially seemed like there are none.

Spend time every day — before falling asleep and when you first wake up is an excellent time — thinking about what you have to be grateful for. Gratitude can make you happy, and happy people seem to attract what they need.

Look for ways to help others, especially those who don’t seem to be able to help themselves. Do it without expecting anything in return. Do it just because we’re all in this together. Go the extra mile for your friends, your customers, your employer, and even for total strangers. People so want someone to really care about them. If you do this, you’ll never be alone — and your life will be fulfilling no matter what is happening.

Finally, use your Holosync every day. If you’ve stopped, start again. If you haven’t started yet, get the initial level and get started. With a one-year money-back guarantee you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Holosync is one of the most powerful antidotes for stress I’ve ever seen. My years of Holosync use seem to have made me almost completely immune to stress, and it can do the same for you. Those who can more easily handle stressful times move through them more easily, and end up finding the hidden opportunities in them and germinating them into successes.

I also invite you, if you’re a Centerpointe customer, to take advantage of our amazing support staff by calling 503-672-7117 or emailing support@centerpointe.com. I want to know how I — and my staff — can help.

And thanks for being a part of Centerpointe. I appreciate it more than I could ever say. And though we may have never met face to face, I do care about you and what happens to you.

One more thing — a short recommendation. My good friend Reverend Michael Beckwith, founder of Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles, one of the largest churches of it’s kind in the world, has a new book, Spirtual Liberation — Fulfilling Your Soul’s Potential. Reverend Michael was one of the stars of The Secret, and is recognized world-wide as one of the true leaders of the new spirituality movement. I urge you to get a copy of his new book. Here is a short blurb from amazon.com:

“Michael Beckwith teaches that inner spiritual work, not religiosity or dogma, liberates us. He draws on a wide spectrum of ancient wisdom teachers such as Jesus the Christ and Gautama the Buddha; contemporary spiritual luminaries Thich Nhat Hanh, Sri Aurobindo, and the Dalai Lama; and Western contributors to the New Thought tradition of spirituality such as Emanuel Swedenborg, Walter Russell, and Dr. Howard Thurman to create a profound new belief synthesis.”

Just go to www.amazon.com and search for “Spiritual Liberation”.

Be well.

Bill

Bookmark It

Hide Sites