The Process of Emerging

Consciousness

Dec 16

From your childhood, you have pursued the definition of who you considered yourself to be as an individual. This definition was determined by a number of factors but certainly, and without question, you used others as a reference point to come up with that definition. If your parents told you that you were X or Y, your child’s mind said, “Well, they say I am so I must be.”

Mom is the CEO on the Board of Directors and Dad is the President. It doesn’t make any difference whether they were actually there. Your mind filled in the blanks.

Other individuals then came onto the Board of Directors: uncles, aunts, priests, teachers, etc. These people played an influential role whether it was positive or negative in your definition of who you considered yourself to be. This is the first step. This is the first part of the journey to awakening.

The individualization package comes with an ego-ideal, a negative-ground-of-being, and a pretend self, the one you pretend to be hoping that that model of yourself will cause everything to go your way, that you will be liked, loved, and accepted. The only problem is that the one they like is not you. The one that is popular is not you. But this is the first step: individualization.

We could hear for a very long time discussing your personality, your emotions, and all of the subsets of each. It can be helpful to you in increasing your understanding of your Self and this is called self-awareness. But I am not speaking about self-awareness. I am speaking about consciousness.

So, again, from your childhood, you have pursued the definition of who you considered yourself to be as an individual. The first step is individualization.

The second step is acquiring. Even a child seeks to acquire acceptance, love, and safety. Many adults are still doing this decades later. In adulthood, the game speeds up with you now seeking to acquire, to possess, power, money, status, recognition. The problem here is the barriers and limitations you have as an individual to acquire what you have chosen to seek.

The third step is the attempt to seek and receive love… and the more power, recognition, status, and money you have, the more your mind sees itself as being deserving of being loved. And still, the mind asks how could anybody love me?

The fourth step is the emergence of consciousness which begins the ascent beyond all of the first three steps toward a new definition of itself, realizing that everything it has achieved up to this point has still not resulted in happiness, fulfillment, or meaning. Please notice that I did not state that Step 4 is awakening or fruition but only the beginning of awakening.

But, in step 4, the game now changes.

Now, it’s vital to keep in mind that the entire process, every bit of it, IS truth-consciousness in the process of realizing itself in physical form. But it is only in step 4 that you realize that this is happening. All of the confusion, all of the self-doubt, all of the meaninglessness of the journey, IS the process of awakening Hidden and disguised, Existence seeking to be aware of itself. That’s you!

But when you consider all the many possibilities that encompass each of the steps, it’s pretty easy to see why it takes longer. There are an unlimited number of ways to individuate, to live, to be, to seek. There are just so many possibilities and roads to walk down!

My children make fun of me because I constantly say things like, “I could have been a great guitarist, I could have been a great baseball player, I could have been a great carpenter.” I even said, “I could have been a great tugboat captain.” Just so many possibilities.

But behind it all lies the secret destiny, the objective, and the outcome of your life…except you don’t know that, so, the game continues over and over and over.

It appears at first as a linear movement, for example, you develop emotional maturation from ages 7-14 and there are many other linear processes. Then, you become aware of cyclical time because you realize there are repetitive patterns in your life. Then, if so chosen, you will experience simultaneous time and the fact that everything that has happened along your way was no coincidence but a necessity and that the outcomes had already been established.

An example in my life of an event that took place that would take another 9 years to play involved my ankle. I had a bicycle accident when I was around 12. When I fell off my bike, my foot got stuck up in the chain guard. I couldn’t get my foot out. I had to drag myself with the bicycle attached to my foot several hundred feet down to a neighbor’s driveway where I cried and yelled for help. For whatever reason, my ankle was not fixed even though it was visibly damaged. My ankle was wrapped in an ace bandage and I went about my life. When I was in college, my foot was starting to curl up under my leg, I was wearing my shoe out on the side of the shoe and not the bottom.

But it was this very ankle that kept me from going to Vietnam as I was classified as 4A with an ankle that was called a deformity. When I was 26 years old, I decided to get my ankle fixed. It was reconstructed and it was like getting a brand new leg. The damage had been done to my body in those years but I would realize soon enough that the accident I had when I was 12 years old was the precise event that kept me from going to the Vietnam war.

Years after that, I felt guilty for not going. But Vietnam was not part of the preparation for fulfilling my reason for being here. Other things, just as devastating, were. So, I say with great conviction, nothing is accidental. If your progression is thwarted through any number of factors and you remain in steps 1, 2, or 3, you can experience sensual experience but you will not experience completion or satisfaction, the satisfaction that is not dependent upon external events, people, or things.

All of the first 3 steps are about seeking and finding this satisfaction, this joy that lies at the heart of all of your struggles. But the game has been designed one would have to know as purposeful, deliberate in which the physical seek the physical to fulfill itself. A new car, another exotic vacation, another partner but seek all you want but you will not find it. All the power in the world will not release you from the inner law of self-realization.

Seeking to fulfill the unique addictions, cravings, desires, and needs of your mental, physical and emotional bodies will result in a story too common to be told: disappointment.

The game has been designed one would have to know as purposeful, deliberate in which the physical seek the physical to fulfill itself.

The physical, you in a physical body, is actually the metaphysical in disguise. So, it is the metaphysical that you truly seek because that is who you really are. But, remember, you don’t know that. You do know you’re in a physical body, so, you seek the physical. The problem, again, is that you are the metaphysical, the vertical, truth-consciousness, God, Truth incarnate and you will not be satisfied and whole and complete until you realize this, that it is the metaphysical seeking the metaphysical realization of itself and you can’t do anything about this because the rules and laws have already been determined.

But whether you remain in a limited physical understanding or you ascend to a wider, more conscious level, it is still in both levels that you continue to seek satisfaction, realization, growth, and realization. Both levels…consciousness and ignorance are trying to achieve the same thing…just going about it two different ways.

Now, revisit the phrase again, the way up and the way are the same. And they both work because they both have the same objective. Do you understand? While I have said that you live in two worlds, what I actually mean is that there are two of you.

There is the you that is a product of the evolutionary, survival process. It’s the superficial, physical you that is limited by a large number of mental, physical, and emotional barriers.

And then, there’s the real you, the spiritual, vertical, metaphysical you, powerful and real. And the problem is that you believe yourself to be the one you are not without having much knowledge at all about the real you.

From roughly 1979-1991, I taught a methodology at the public secondary level called, “Suggestive Accelerative Learning and Teaching.” I came across some research in 1978 about a man named Georgi Lozonov, who was in charge of the Institute of Suggestology in Sophie, Bulgaria, that really got my attention. At the time, Lozonov was under house arrest and no information was coming out of the institute because of the discoveries he was making and the Berlin wall was still operating. But in my research, I found that 5 Americans had studied under him, and low and behold, one of them was teaching Spanish at Mars Hill College, a small college 15 minutes from Asheville, NC. I contacted her, spent a weekend under her guidance, and returned committed to a new life in the classroom.

I began to spend as much time on teaching students how to learn and how to memorize as I did the content I was teaching. It was life-changing. I taught 5 classes a day and in the fall of the first year, one of the classes was 10 minutes into a learning process that required the students to be still with eyes closed as they were guided through a particular learning process.

Suddenly, a girl on the front row caught my attention and I began to feel a certain nervousness as it was clear that she was not comfortable. And suddenly without warning, she begins to hyperventilate. Everyone comes to and I leap from the front of the room to her desk as she stumbles to her feet trying to breathe but can’t. I yelled at one of the kids, go get the principal. As she continues to struggle, I am frightened out of my mind because I am scared that I have injured this girl with this new methodology. Not knowing what to do, and panicking, I put my hands under her armpits, put her on my lap and I started rocking her, telling her over and over, “It’s OK, it’s OK, you’re safe, everything’s alright.”

I felt the surge in her body coming and she gasped and began to sob uncontrollably. The principal came running in and there we all were, all 25 of us, circled around this girl. I placed her back in the seat where she put her head on her desk and continued sobbing. As she began to calm down, I asked her as gently as I could, “Are you ok? What happened?” The principal joined the conversation and soon, her sobbing came to an end, as she was sitting there exhausted. And I asked again, “What happened?”

This is what she said: “In the learning exercise, you came to a point where you used the word father. I haven’t seen my father in almost 10 years and it was more than I could bear. I miss him so much.”

And suddenly right there, what she showed me was what I would call the onion skin. I saw the mental, physical and emotional barriers that she had built up over the years that although they were designed to protect her from her loss, they had imprisoned her. I could hardly speak or breathe.

I spent the next 10 years designing the learning processes around what she had taught me, what she had shown me, and how once expressed from years of being repressed resulted in freedom and growth.

That afternoon when all of this happened, the experience that we all had would become known as the circle. That’s what the kids called it. So important it became, that all of the classes insisted that at one class every two-three weeks would be dedicated to the circle and the exploration and discovering of what we were all in the process of learning.

The process of everyday life has so much to break through, so many levels to pierce. The process is so difficult.

Several weeks later, the principal called me into his office to discuss the situation. He explained to me that a substitute teacher who had filled in for me in that exact class had filed a complaint against me.

I asked him, “What was the complaint?” I was scared and nervous.

He said, “The complaint says that you are teaching the students to worship the devil.”

I paused and asked, “What did you tell him?”

He said, “I told him that I already know that Mr. Hasty does that but he does it so well.

And then he looked at me and said, “Keep doing your research and keep posting your findings and I’ll keep supporting you.”

“Yes, sir,” I said and I left more committed than ever to what we were learning.

I share this story to acknowledge and simultaneously honor the thick barriers, mental, physical, and emotional, that divide you from the true reality of who you are. The process of everyday life has so much to break through, so many levels to pierce. The process is so difficult.

But that is because you are not developed, you are not trained to see the unreal from the real, to see the true from the false, and the limitations of the superficial being, the “not” you because you think and identify with the “not” you and being the real you. The separation from the real self is the only problem. Therapy intensifies your identification with the unreal part of you, making that division and separation from your true self only wider and stronger and more cemented in lies.

It’s not difficult to understand that the only thing that the unreal you can create is an unreal life, in other words, a life steeped in falsehoods and misunderstandings. And you are well aware that many individuals defend with great tenacity their right to be miserable and sad. The real problem is that you don’t know who you are and in order to learn the truth of that, consciousness will instigate with great precision all of the events necessary for your awakening…and even then, individuals will defend their imprisonment.

Consciousness seeks to know and experience joy no matter what, conscious existence no matter what, right in the middle of the mess, right in the middle of the duality of everyday life and the contradictions and duplicitous behaviors of countless individuals on an everyday basis and if you could taste that for even a second, you will not go back into the cave for you will know and experience if just for a glimpse, the truth of who you are.

But this is impossible to do because of the addictions and defenses of the old system that will rise up when being questioned or challenged, who will remind you that if you seek to change, you will die, that transformation is certainly a wonderful thing to consider but that it is not real and that the only reality is what is not real.

Now, all 4 steps of the process, and to remind you once again:

Step 1: Individualization.

Step 2: Acquiring.

Step 3: Seeking to give and receive love.

Step 4: Awakening.

All of the 4 steps are governed by an underdeveloped mind that often, associates pleasure with pain, pain with pleasure, and indifference with repression and rage. So, we always get stuck in 1-3 without making much progress in Step 4. And that’s OK.

Self-realization and the truth of your existence are only attainable through a spiritual transformation which is the ascent into spiritual existence and the return to your everyday life. Truth or self-knowledge is also only attainable unless you’re willing to behind the walls of your superficial existence and ego.

The CEO on your Board of Directors must be YOU.

This is your true defense against the blows of life, this you, this real you is your only true need and in this realization, you are able to speed up and transcend the dualities, contradictions, and hypocrisies of life.

When this occurs the pleasures of your life can be heightened or maximized and the pains can be lessened or minimized. The secret reality of who you are that has been submerged begins at last to announce its Self.