Bradshaw On, page 24
There is also some suggestive evidence that this consciousness is connected to all other created consciousness. The early telepathy studies of J. B. Rhine at Duke University pointed clearly in this direction. The more recent work of Puthoff and Targ at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) on Remote Viewing ESP has offered powerful new data suggesting that once in higher consciousness, we have a higher power available to us. Their belief is that this power results from being connected to all other created consciousness.
There are also ancient traditions supporting a higher power through expanded consciousness. The American Indian medicine healers believe there is greater power available through the use of meditation and the fusion with power animals. Jesus told his followers that there were powers available to them that were greater than the powers he manifested.
The remote viewing experiments at SRI have corroborated some of the conclusions of quantum physics. These experiments suggest that we are not limited by space and time. People in sealed rooms can see what someone else is seeing 30 miles away. This research is recorded in books like The Silent Pulse by George Leonard and Mind Reach by Harold E. Puthoff and Russell Targ.
When we are in the highest moments of consciousness, we are one with the universe. We are a hologram of the world. The world is a system and we are partly a whole and wholly a part. Each of us in our own way is the universe. Many great spiritual masters have taught this for centuries. The ego creates separation and illusion. Once beyond ego there is no separation. We are all one. Modern science is catching up with the perennial wisdom.
Modern science makes it clear that mind and body are not antagonists. Mind and body are two different forms of energy. Our consciousness is now understood as high-frequency energy. As forms of energy, mind and body influence each other.
If mind and matter are the same stuff, we can learn to use matter in more powerful and profound ways. Learning to let go of ego control and turning it over to higher consciousness are powerful ways to get results. A slogan in AA says, “Let go and let God.” People speak of powerful things happening in their lives when they turn it over to their Higher Power.
I will now summarize the findings I’ve been describing.
We are more than our ordinary ego consciousness. To find our true self we have to transcend our ordinary ego consciousness. This conclusion:
1. Is compatible with a growing amount of behavioral science data;
2. Is integral to almost all the world’s religious traditions; and
3. If fully believed at the personal level, would totally transform our lives.
The propositions leading to this central conclusion are:
1. Much of our significant mental activity goes on outside of conscious awareness. Examples include biofeedback, dreams, intuitive knowing, family systems and ego defenses.
2. The powers of suggestion and autosuggestion are far greater than we typically assume. We all operate in a posthypnotic SPELL induced in early infancy. The major elements of this SPELL come from our family of origin and the culture we are born into. This SPELL operates unconsciously.
3. We will resist the knowledge we most deeply desire. Language, ego defenses, denials, delusions, family systems and cultural roles keep us from higher consciousness.
4. Each of us has access to a supra-conscious, creative, integrative, self-organizing, intuitive mind whose capabilities are apparently unlimited. This is the part of our consciousness that constitutes our God-likeness.
5. Higher consciousness is connected to all other forms of consciousness.
6. There is no reason to doubt that my creative/unconscious mind may have a plan for me. As we look back over our lives, it often seems clear that there was such a plan. We are free to follow or disregard it.
7. Acting in accordance with my Higher Power’s plan, I can expect my actions to be in harmony with the ultimate well-being of all those around me. I will be moved toward compassionate social action.
8. There seems to be no reason to doubt that the necessary resources for actualizing the plan will be available whenever needed. Einstein has shown that mind and matter are both energy. There is copious evidence that proves the power of mind energy over matter energy (psychokinesis, etc.).
9. It appears that a healthy life is one in which the act of choosing is given over to the creative/intuitive mind. One way this is accomplished is through the conscious contact resulting from prayer and meditation.
10. One of the conditions for hearing an undistorted inner voice is the willingness to perceive differently. This involves a number of spiritual disciplines in which the ego is bypassed.1
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1 These propositions are adapted from a lecture by Willis Harman.
These propositions fill me with hope. In order to actualize what they promise, let’s look at prayer and meditation.
Spiritual Disciplines
The 11th Step spoke of prayer and meditation. These are the two fundamental tools for opening up our higher consciousness and making conscious contact with our Higher Power.
Every religion and spiritual tradition teaches its devotees to pray and meditate. There are many ways to approach prayer and meditation. No way is the right way and no prayer or meditation technique is in itself the goal we are seeking. We can get stuck trying to find the best technique. Prayer and meditation techniques are like the booster rocket stage of a spacecraft launch. The booster’s job is to get the spaceship out of Earth’s gravitational pull so that it can reach outer space. Techniques for prayer and meditation are ways to reach beyond ego so that we can reach the expanded spaces of our higher consciousness.
Once we have reached that altered state, we can have a more intimate and immediate contact with our Higher Power. Reaching the experience of conscious contact is what is important. Once we are at this level of awareness, our more essential self becomes visible. To know and be who we really are is our destiny. If we fail to achieve this, we have missed the mark. Perhaps only the greatest saints fully achieve what I am describing. But full self-awareness (sometimes called enlightenment) and oneness with God are the most profound callings of our being.
There are many other approaches to inner spiritual life. Many believe that dreams are not only a direct way to access our unconscious, but also the most direct way that our higher power encounters us. I point to the many sacred scriptures of various religious traditions that record direct encounters with God through dreams. In my own experience, dreams have been valuable sources of self-understanding. I’ve described what the psychologist Carl Jung called a “big dream” in my books Healing the Shame That Binds You and Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child.
Big dreams help us break through stuck places in our lives. Some people describe achieving inner peace and conscious contact with their Higher Power through journal writing. They contend that writing out their dialogue with their Higher Power is a form of prayer and that it focuses and expands their awareness of the reality of their Higher Power.
Worship services, spiritual rituals, fasting and mortifications of one’s appetites are other forms of spiritual discipline. The form itself seems less important than the sincerity of one’s intentions.
Compassionate Social Action
I spoke of the 12th Step earlier. This step describes the fruit of the first 11 Steps as “spiritual awakening.”
The last of the 12 Steps states:
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicts and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
The 12th Step is a call to social action. It asks recovering alcoholics to do two things:
1. To carry the message to other suffering alcoholics; and
2. To practice the principles of the 12 Steps in all their affairs.
I understand the 12th Step as a call to compassionate social action. Alcoholism is the tip of the iceberg of addictiveness. Any type of ultimate concern (making money, being well-liked, etc.) can become an addiction. Many spiritual masters contend that any form of life without God-consciousness is a form of addiction.
In this book, I have tried to show you the vast extent of destruction caused by addictive behaviors. But even if you don’t identify with the addictiveness I’ve been describing, the call to compassionate social action is a part of finding your true self. We humans are by nature social. Our lives were shaped by the mirroring eyes of our source figures. The foundation of our solid selfhood was formed in the matrix of our earliest source relationships. As we develop a solid sense of self-esteem and experience the goodness of our own being, we want to reach out to that same goodness in others. Goodness is diffusive of itself. It is part of the fullness of our being to care for others. Once our ego-dependency needs are met, love and care are the personality strengths that our nature calls us to develop. Love and care are higher-order “being” needs—we need to love and care for others if we want to be self-actualized. As our self-actualization progresses, our values are more and more concerned with being.
The specific social action we take is less important than the commitment to social action itself. Erik Erikson describes this commitment as generativity. When we are generative, we reach outside ourselves in productive, creative and socially valuable ways. One person may be an environmentalist. Another may work with the dying or homeless. The specific action is less important than the reaching outside of oneself.
George Bernard Shaw once suggested that the true meaning of life is to live for something defined by yourself as a mighty cause. He said:
I want to be used up when I die. . . . Life is not a walking shadow . . . rather it is a splendid torch that I want to set afire and hand onto the next generation before I die.
The danger for those who reach middle adulthood feeling some sense of mastery is that they can become obsessed with themselves and stagnate. I consider self-stagnation a sign that you have not fully regained self-esteem. Because when we have a full sense of self-love and self-value, we will of necessity want to expand and grow. That happens by developing a deep inner life and by expressing the richness and goodness of that inner life in compassion for others.
If we experience a blissful contact with a Higher Power, that power cannot be less than good and loving or else it wouldn’t be a Higher Power, since goodness and love are our highest human values. And if it is good and loving, our Higher Power cannot be less than a personal being since we’ve never experienced goodness and love except in interpersonal relationships. Thus the conscious contact that is created in inner stillness desires to be expressed in outer compassion toward others. The fruit of spiritual awakening is to carry the graceful goodness and love we have received and give it to others.
Deep Democracy
Full human self-actualization demands that we care for the planet we live on. For me this is a call to compassionate social action extending to nature and world peace.
The evolution of our present consciousness makes human self-actualization even more urgent. We have arrived at a point of consciousness where we realize for the first time the dynamics of human evolution and the evolution of the universe. This new stage of consciousness has revealed some of the fundamental laws governing all life, and we are beginning to see how these laws relate to families. The law of differentiation tells us that the differences in the world are part of the dynamic process whereby the universe is becoming conscious of itself and unfolding. The differences in the world are part of the solution—not part of the problem. The law of differentiation, in particular, has relevance to the formation of individual self-esteem and identity. The law of differentiation is also important when trying to understand the differences between cultures and nations of the world. When people grow up enmeshed in their family systems, they tend to project that enmeshment onto their national system. Enmeshed nations become closed and prejudicial systems. A closed system sees any other system that is different from it as the enemy. This is the cause of wars and the violent destruction that goes with it. Hitler and the Nazi system created a trance-like belief that Aryans were a master race of people. That belief ushered in a reign of violent murder and destruction unlike any the world had ever known. We can never forget this and we must never cease trying to understand how Hitler’s Germany could have happened.
That was one of the questions that I began my PBS series with and one of the questions I posed in this book. I hope some awareness about the destructive potential of closed systems has emerged from the content of this book. Closed systems are extremely dangerous because they deself their members and deprive them of self-esteem. Closed systems are dangerous because they allow no feedback. When no new information can be integrated into a system, it feeds upon itself and becomes an absolutizing agent. Its own beliefs become sacred laws; its own rules infallible; its own leaders all-powerful. This is exactly the problem with monarchial patriarchy and the poisonous pedagogy it spawns.
How are we going to accept each other’s differences? How can we come to believe that every culture, with its unique mythology, religion and ethnicity, is necessary for the survival of life on our planet? I don’t profess to have a full answer to these questions. I know that our ultimate survival depends on how we answer them. I do believe that by each of us developing a rich inner life in which we find the stillness that reveals the interconnectedness of all life and a loving Higher Power, we can engage in responsible, compassionate and loving social action. If we can find our own inner peace and express it outwardly, we can develop a sense of deep democracy. Deep democracy is the internalization of the timeless feeling of compassionate love for all life. Every great religious tradition has deep democracy at its core. With the feeling of deep democracy, we respect every part of the system we live in and we also give every part a voice. In a family, this means that power is shared and each person’s viewpoint is respected. It means that each person in the family, from the unborn fetus to the oldest person, is respected and honored as a unique, unrepeatable and sacred person.
If we can create families that are deeply democratic, we can expect that our societies and nations will be deeply democratic. Carl Jung once said that at bottom, all great historical events are the result of some individual person or persons. It is in individuals that transformations first take place. So what is most important is the spiritual awakening of each individual.
Taking Action
When I first started in my 12-Step recovery program, I found a little green card that asked me to do two things each day to help some fellow suffering human beings. The card said to do them in a way that no one would know what I had done. The card was a call to virtuous action. Doing morally good works is a private matter and loses its goodness if it is made public. I found this very hard to do. I realized how much I wanted my good works to be acknowledged and praised. I wanted credit for doing them. I followed that card’s suggestions in a human, not perfect, way. I found the experience incredibly rewarding.
I cannot tell anyone else exactly what to do in terms of community building and social service. I can only urge you to do something (two things each day that no one will find out about).
Doing works that help rebuild our social harmony are ways to expand our souls. Do good works because good works are good to do if you can. Probably only saints do good without some ulterior motive. Rather than letting their grand achievements deter us, we can let them inspire us. After all, nothing human is foreign to me. It is possible to love as they have shown us.
But even with ulterior motives, you gain a great deal. Love and compassion expand our being and allow us to transcend ourselves. In loving others we become more than we were because when we truly love, we become the other. We experience what it means to be them. The consciousness that results from loving is an expanded consciousness. It potentially connects us with every living thing. And the more we love, the more we expand our consciousness of others.
Being Ordinary
Each of us is unique in the sense that there has never been anyone like us before and never will be again. In this regard we are truly special. But it’s also important to be ordinary in the sense that I am the same as all other human beings on this planet. I struggle with the same vulnerabilities. I am subject to the same fate and live with the same fear of death, “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns,” as Shakespeare said. No one is above the limits of human finitude. But the more I love and give myself in social service, the more I feel a sense of belonging. When I believe I am special or too good for common social action, or when I simply let others do it, I experience isolation and closure.
Wisdom
The great spiritual master Sri Aurobini says, “You must know the highest before you can truly understand the lowest.” The third stage of our journey toward wholeness gives us a new perspective on all that has gone before. Stage III leads to wholeness itself. In becoming complete we see more clearly what is important.
Wisdom may be defined as knowing what is and what isn’t important. With wisdom we see the whole picture. This is why it takes a long time to truly grow wise. It is only in the evening that we can evaluate the whole day. Wisdom allows us to know the parts by knowing the whole. When we are wise, we see the interconnectness of all things. With wisdom, we unify our vision. We see how paradoxical polarities fit together. We understand that life and death are part of the whole.
Bliss
Once we find comfort inside ourselves, tremendous transformations take place. First, a new kind of peace and calm come over us. Our inner life belongs to us alone. It depends on us, not on something outside of us. We can depend on this inner world because we actually experience it. It will never go away. By having an inner life we are no longer dependent on the outside for our good feeling; we can engender peace and calm from within.
