Awakening without Mastery has no Value

Many people who have encountered my work have been seekers for many years. For them, and all others, Witness Thought Transformation brings about a dramatic Awakening within a short period of time. This brings with it a freedom from ego, defensive patterns, and an understanding of life at a new level of awareness.

Then something very sinister begins to happen. The ego mind sets about to co-opt the entire process. What this means is that the old patterns start making their way back into one’s life, and before you know it – your back into the same misery you were in before your Awakening.

Awakening comes as such a huge shift and with such a complete knowing that it is easy for us to think that we’ve got it and no more growth work is necessary. As a result, the new experience of being awake gets gradually integrated into the ego defenses that where already there.

Let me give you a for instance. If you have passive defenses like getting away, avoidance, and isolation, your new found Awakening may eventually be subsumed into activities like retreats, long periods of meditation, or silent weekends.

If you have active defenses like being angry or hostile you may begin to use your new awakened state to judge and condemn those who are still not awake.

I see this all the time in the emails and phone calls I get. Those who learn Witness Thought Transformation are transformed alright, but they often stop right there thinking they have made it. Their messages to me contain all kinds of energy around their unresolved issues.

The road to Mastery requires you to stop with each and every emotional reaction and relentlessly ask the right questions until you get to the bottom of it. Once you get to the bottom of it, go to the next reaction and do it all over again. That’s Mastery.

There is good news about all of this however. Each of us only is enslaved by about 2 or 3 patterns. So the road to Mastery, while being a lifelong commitment, is not a complicated task. Once you have mastered the couple of patterns that are constantly trying to hijack you, it merely becomes a matter of vigilance. The even better news is that vigilance becomes second nature after a while.

I am currently starting a coaching program to help people master their patterns. If this is of interest to you, contact me and we can talk about it. In the mean time, every time you react, every time you send an email or pick up the phone, ask yourself this question, “Where is this really coming from?”

The Monkey Brain Strikes Again

My upcoming book, Mastering Thought, has a subtitle, Loquacious Simianus. Many of us know what loquacious means. It means talkative. But Simianus may be a bit of a mystery. It is a Latin word that means monkey. This is what I call the Limbic System. It is the part of the brain that we share with other mammals like dogs and cats and primates. Since it is all about fight or flight, anger/fear, and survival, and since it is in charge of all emotions in the brain, I call it the monkey.

Now the missing piece that ties together the monkey and “talkative” is that the Limbic System is the driver of the voice in your head that sounds like you talking to you. Therefore we all have a loquacious simianus in our heads! Yuk!

But this particular monkey has some specialties; namely rationalization, regurgitation, and recapitulation. Rationalization is the process of constructing a logical justification for a behavior that was originally arrived at through a different emotional process. In other words, it is a story we tell ourselves to make us feel okay about something we did that we probably shouldn’t have.

Regurgitation is the rehashing of something said or done that we simply cannot digest in its original form usually because to digest it in that form would make us sick!

Recapitulation is a brief summary of what we did. The beauty of recapitulation is that is allows us to leave out key facts from our summary thus making us look better.

You notice that the three “R”s of the monkey are about the past.

There is another specialty the monkey has about the future; anticipation. Anticipation is the building of a scenario of what will happen in the future. Anticipation is almost totally useless since the future can never be predicted, but it gives the monkey a sense of control over what we cannot control!

As long as we believe we are the voice in our heads, the monkey has its way with us, and we have lost our way. This is where Witness Thought Transformation™ comes in. It frees us from the monkey. To be sure, the primitive primate doesn’t necessarily die, it just becomes irrelevant and we go free of its influence. Oh loquacious simianus – take a hike!