I wanted to mention before we get started that I have a new section on my home website call Spirit Cards. These are pictures I have created with Spirit ideas. Please feel free to check them out at http://www.geocities.com/visualizenews/spiritcards.html. Please be forewarned that the content can be slow to load.
Hello and welcome back! Today I will be continuing with part seven of a nine-part series on the theme of internal healing. I have to admit that I generated this material as part of my attempt to heal myself of a chronic health condition. Although these techniques have been very valuable to me, they haven�t healed me physically, so at this point you should think of them as purely healing to the psyche. There are twenty-six �healing keys� in all, but we will only be discussing eighteenth through twentieth keys in this edition, which is plenty to work with over several sittings. In fact, I would recommend breaking it up over at least three sessions if possible. For March 2004, I will roll out numbers twenty-one through twenty-three of the �Healing Keys.�
Before I discuss the twelfth healing key, I want to explain the meditation that you will use with all the healing keys. The meditation is specific to this exercise, although it could be used in other contexts. We will call it the �healing lock� meditation. This meditation will specifically work with each �healing key� in the best possible way to release its maximum positive impact on you. Begin by getting relaxed and have a notebook and pen handy.
Visualize a gold or copper circle with a black (old fashioned) keyhole design in the middle (see above). As you breath in, say internally, �I am in healing lock meditation on�,� here you breath out slowly, saying internally, ��the healing key of ____healing____ .� You will fill those spaces in with the name of the healing key, which is always described in the form �x healing y.� Conceptualize this meditation as being the perfect lock for the key to operate in, the perfect means to achieve the healing. Simply plug in the name of the healing key after reading the description and memorizing its basic meaning. If you have insights during your meditation, you can jot them down at the end of the meditation period.
We will begin today by discussing the eighteenth healing key, which is freedom from slave mentality healing culture. What is the slave mentality? It is when a person embraces a set of values that accept the partial enslavement of others and themselves in exchange for the possibility of long-term rewards for themselves. This includes the slave master modality as well. This is the culture of haves and have-nots with one group taking advantage of the other. Those who seek to become successful in a slave-mentality-based culture have their eye set on ultimately achieving slave-master status.
This piece is not meant as an attack on Capitalism or as a promotion of any other system of government. Rather, it is meant to examine a questionable mindset that drives many people in our society. The slave-mentality causes a person to attempt to become a successful slave by doing whatever it takes to succeed. This can involve lying, cheating, stealing and backstabbing to get ahead. It might express itself in some people as simply a strong intention to work very hard with the hope of getting what they feel they deserve in the long run, with no intention of taking questionable shortcuts.
The slave-mentality person accepts a system that is rife with basic inequalities and injustices as being fundamentally sound because as an individual you can use the system to your own personal advantage. It begins with an acceptance that people can and will be treated as �slaves� by those who take on the roles of �slave-masters.� At the heart of this system is the idea that it is acceptable to use other people as long as it is diluted into a broad social context that renders people faceless and nameless.
The slave-mentality person usually enters the system young as a slave, performing uncomfortable work for minimum pay. This is acceptable because the person expects to ultimately be rewarded for their hard work down the road. Some lucky individuals float directly into the master-levels of society and never have to perform slave work. The young slave will drive themselves with the principal of self-sacrifice and a growing expectation over time of being rewarded.
Over the years of hard work and low compensation a person may either be promoted to slave-master status or continue to float at the slave levels with a growing sense of entitlement stirring inside of them. If this entitlement is not fed in the form of more income and status, the individual becomes either depressed, enraged or both. Like a friend who borrows money and does not repay it, the individual can come to feel cheated by society.
The slave-mentality is rooted in rituals. Through the compulsive and ceaseless performance of rituals the person hopes to be rewarded. It could almost be seen as a form of magical ritual where the individual performs certain steps with an ultimate sense that the quality of �success� will be evoked. This person will ritualize their relationships and apply the ideas of work, entitlement and reward to them as well. We will discuss this in more detail a bit further on.
The slave-mentality is drawn by the carrot of ultimate reward and compelled by the whip of shame and guilt. Slave culture is shame-based, as the individual is not just treated like garbage, but must ultimately come to believe that they are in some way inferior and therefore deserve less compensation. The slave-mentality is filled with a sort of self-loathing that represents culturally-inserted brainwashing. The only way to be relieved oneself of this intense shame is through hard work.
Slave life is harsh and rather unrewarding in many cases. There must be a compensating reward in the system to create balance. This balance is created by materialism and greed. The fixation on consumer goods is fed by imbuing them with artificial value, allowing the individual to drive themselves with greed and toward their perceived reward. The rush of receiving and thrill of the chase compel the person through intense pain as if it was nothing. Through emotional disassociation the person can suppress their own emotional pain and fixate on their greed and goals that relate to that greed.
Deeply embedded in all of this is a culture of denial. We are taught to deny what we feel and to find value and meaning in essentially valueless things. Those who suffer in such a culture are the ones who understand how empty these goals really are. For them there can be no offset for the pain and misery of being treated like a slave. They cannot project a fantasy of a future where things will somehow be better. And, they cannot ignore the suffering all around them in a million different forms. Before we are walking, talking objects we are people who feel. If the person who feels has to be �killed� in order to create the �thing� that is simply a glorified object, then the basis of real life itself has been lost.
Those who step out of the mindset are quickly identified and punished if they express their opinions. Slave culture members are constantly on the watch for deserters. The essential fragility of slave-mentality is that the truth must be suppressed or the unfeasibility of the entire system may be revealed. The internalized guilt of the slave-mentality person quickly turns into rage against any person who dares to question hard work or self-sacrifice as fundamental values. But the real thing that is being protected is actually the reality of slavery itself, which must not be exposed. By fixating constantly on future imagined rewards slaves are discouraged from feeling the pain of the present moment.
We are basically equal beings on a Spiritual level and on the physical level as well. Some have more wealth, looks or power than others, but there is no real basis for inequality of individuals. That is a mythology of our own creation. The decision that a person must accept a value that has been arbitrarily placed on their life and their effort is likewise completely arbitrary. Nothing can destroy our basic equality in reality. As society has sought to enspell or enchant us in a certain way, we must become �disenchanted� with a slave-mentality as well as a necessary step toward freedom.
Classlessness is what we can strive for internally as an alternative to slave-mentality. We must see that we have immeasurable and therefore potentially unlimited value as people. We cannot assess our value to the world because of the chain of cause and effect, people and events that flow seamlessly one to another. Because of this intense interrelationship and the fact that through time we all have some unknowable impact on the world, the value of others or ourselves is not measurable. Likewise, material things have an unknowable value as well. Money is an arbitrary system of evaluation as is our legal system.
Before we brush through this last paragraph, let�s examine it more carefully. We must take this information and actually use it. We often interact with people on the level of only giving them a value based on what they can do for us in the moment. If we actually learn to shift our thinking in such a way that we can meet people and relate to them as having an unknowable value to others and ourselves we can feel and react to people differently.
Being closer to the truth empowers us. By being open to the unknowable value of people we become powerful in our relationships. We can learn more and benefit more from them. As a first step, try going out and interacting with strangers in a safe environment. Approach the specific people you talk to as if they had an unknowable value to you. Now extend that to friends and people you interact with normally. Observe how it changes your normal routine of communication. Give yourself the same benefit of unknowable value to these people as well.
Classlessness is a vehicle for compassion because we drop our artificial assessments of people and things and stop using our reasoning mind as a means to distance ourselves from other people. Compassion means being able to look at another human being and say, �that could have been me; that could have been my life story.� When we cross the compassion line, we turn our backs on the violence and artificiality of the world and seek something more fulfilling. What form that takes is less important and less predictable.
Being classless allows us to engage in Spirituality. This is because Spirituality is ultimately a form of utopian society based on love and equality. The form and shape of that society is defined by internal qualities of the beings involved as much as the external forms. We cannot create a more ideal society on earth without evolving into classlessness internally. The forms that come out of our commitment to this change cannot be guessed at, but you can be sure that your impact on the world will be vast and far-reaching.
The nineteenth healing key is the debunking of materialism healing loss of freedom. Freedom can be modeled as a point attached to many lines spreading out in many different directions. The point at the center is the mindset of the individual and the lines represent models for freedom that they have drawn for themselves. These models of freedom accurately reflect the limits of the knowledge of the individual who creates them. For many, the models of freedom they use are their greatest form of enslavement.
Each individual model for freedom as defined by an individual represents a desire that the person is reaching to fulfill. However, the actual �freedom� in the pursuit of that desire is often less obvious. In a world of forms, shapes, bodies and circumstances there is little we do that is �free.� When we experience some small lifting of the oppressive binding effects of our world, we think of that as freedom. It is as if a dog that is tied up is granted an extra ten feet of leash. It is not so much �freedom� as a slightly less exaggerated enslavement.
It may be that we say that we want freedom, but we really mean a certain type of structure that is less oppressive. It is not so much freedom we are lacking as a supportive structure in our life that will be both flexible and responsive to us. And, there is nothing more flexible and responsive than consciousness. Within our own minds we are all bound by internal chains of various sorts. What we think we want, what we think we need and all our attachments represent chains that bind us. We seek new illusions to replace old ones, but as we grasp at apparent freedom we find only new types of limitation.
It is for this reason that people ultimately turn to their own minds for answers. They ask themselves why their old models of freedom didn�t work and examine the role of their own mind in this problem. There is a sense of waking up to one�s self as you place your chips on the table. Examining with a critical eye and new awareness the contents of your own mind, you see the grasping and confusion that constantly mislead us. Fortunately, mind is vast and far-reaching, extending well beyond the normal limits of our conscious mind. It is in this internal environment that we begin to glimpse a more substantial freedom.
For each desire that is based in a false world, we are forced to live in a world of pain and violence to get at the fulfillment we desire. For example, a higher consciousness being can imagine and experience anything, but in order to fulfill desires that fall outside of the truth they must immerse themselves in a fantasy that is full of pain. To assert that there is materiality in existence is the first untruth. Fantasies of living in a material world are what we are actually in now. No such world is real or even possible. Matter cannot exist because if it did there would be something that was not made of consciousness and the nature of reality would be overturned. Consciousness would be enslaved by the laws of materiality.
Such a world cannot exist, nor can there be the hand-in-hand concepts of time and space. These concepts would likewise bind consciousness. MIND is not beholden to the concepts it imagines. Rather, it imagines in order to fulfill desire and then the fantasy is gone. Likewise we can see how our current circumstances are mind dependent. Without a mind to experience the body there is no experience.
Material existence is both obvious and yet elusive. The nature of subatomic particles is like a hall of mirrors, with smaller and smaller events making up the larger particles. Like a circus hall of mirrors we seek some fundamental materiality in materiality, but instead find only more and more empty space and tiny events whose nature is defined by even more space and even tinier events.
We never leave the world of reality, even when immersed in illusions, because there is really nowhere else to go. Our own mind is both the prisoner and jail-keeper. Part of our identity must hide from consciousness in order to maintain the illusion. Because we are not truly separate beings in any sense, our fantasy desires interlock and are interdependent, thus creating the world.
Freedom must be redefined in the light of truth or we will only feed on more and more sophisticated kinds of slavery. When we have exhausted all the models of freedom at our disposal, we face a kind of philosophical dead end. However it is at this moment that we make our greatest quantum leap in freedom by finding a new internal level of freedom through self-examination and insight. We are then free to explore all these new models of freedom until they too are of no more interest and we repeat the process at a higher level.
There is no end to this process. After the �dark night of the soul� we may be discouraged and disillusioned. But being free from our illusions is completed by finding a higher level of consciousness to explore internally. Then the forms of our life may remain somewhat similar but the experience of our life may alter radically. The search for freedom is really the long, patient walk out of the maze of our own creation and the pursuit of all our desires along the way.
The twentieth healing key is the removal of ambition to heal one�s career. This is a seemingly paradoxical statement on the surface, but it will make more sense as we explore the idea. The ideal career is what comes out of you naturally, doing what you love to do and experiencing your career as a natural extension of your life. You perform your career as an act of love, enjoying it and putting your whole self into it while maintaining a balanced life overall.
Career in this light is not a burden, a chore or something to be held over our head in judgment. We can�t �fail� at it or even succeed at it; our success is in the feeling we get in doing what we love and helping others through doing it. This is a more natural state of affairs. However, the seeds of artificiality have been planted in almost all of us and we are driven by certain artificial concepts that form ambitions.
Ambition is an unnatural state of affairs that is full of artificiality. Ambition pits you against others in a competition to have the coveted positions that are in demand. Ambition is emotionally non-compelling. Instead of containing real emotion it is driven by neuroses such as fear, greed and narcissism. Fear is at the heart of all of these approaches. It drives the self to act compulsively and aggressively with little thought for the cost that it is having on the whole self.
The Faustian bargain is really a good model for ambition. The person seeks gratification by losing touch with their humanity and acting purely out of a self-serving mindset. They define fulfillment in the most crass, superficial terms possible while denying deeper and more emotionally real levels of gratification. The loss of self is too much of a price to pay for all that greed, ambition and competition can buy for you. You can�t help, in watching many professional athletic events, but to notice that behind the celebration and triumph of the winner are five or six or more losers who have achieved bitter disappointment in their pursuit of success.
Ambition can achieve much, but in the light of the individual who is driven by ambition there is much more to lose. The problem with ambition is not so much that it is �wrong� or �bad� so much as it is an artificial condition that interferes with true being. The non-anger-based impulses that we have that come from the love of doing something constructive are natural and flow from us unimpeded. We might have a knack for comedy, be interested in fixing cars or collecting exotic plants. However, because of the structure of our society we also hold onto the seeds of ambition that work to impede our natural flow of creativity and constructive impulses.
Ambition comes from a place of poverty and need. It starts with the assumption that in order to get what you want you must resort to competitive behavior. Others will attempt to take away from you what you need and you will be left with nothing. Rage and fear are held tight to ambition�s chest. Ambition stifles creativity and the impulse to act creatively. It does this by means of stifling our natural and un-coerced relationship with life, turning us inward and away from the world and into a defensive and narcissistic posture.
In this mode we replace the world and other people with ourselves, seeking the same satisfaction and fulfillment we would get in a healthy relationship with others and the world in general through an unhealthy relationship with ourselves. Consumed with greed, the ambition cannot see others or it risks having feelings for them. The safest posture is for it to become navel gazing, seeing people only as objects in a landscape of fantasy and projection. The real world is in essence rendered partially unreal to make room for the broad fantasies of the ambition. The fantasies of power, success and achievement as well as hatred and contempt for the �losers� who are pushed out of the way in the process of achieving our own success are the only feelings that are nurtured by ambition. Love, trust and community have no place here, except as fraudulent masks of good will to be stripped off at an opportune moment.
The spiral motion of ambition is inward and towards a life of fantasy and projection. Successful ambition simply reinforces and brings out the fantasy emotions while failure causes stress, fear and an all-consuming need to take shortcuts and succeed at any cost. It all depends on how much actual success is needed to feed the fantasy. Failure in one arena may lead to depression and defeat or to simply finding new goals to fantasize about and pursue. Ambition is not truly fulfilled in the external world but in the fantasy life of the participant.
For those people who seem adrift or ambitionless it would be easy to dismiss them as being free from all ambition. However, they are often weighed down with ambition but have simply labeled themselves as being lazy, failures or as unmotivated. The poisoning of their mind remains in the form of lost dreams and humiliation. This is the dark reverse side of ambition, that without the success or fantasy of success to prop a person up they perceive themselves as being worthless and their lives as being valueless. The truth is that the individual has unknowable value and just needs to be able to see it.
Creation with passion is the positive goal that replaces ambition. Ambition is the proverbial middle-man who ends up getting in the way. Creation from passion is always within us even though it might be temporarily stifled from reaching our conscious mind. To reach creation with passion we must remove ambition from our mind for periods of time until we are able to begin to experience our natural creativity.
Before we engage in the meditation itself, lets try an exercise to get a feel for what it is like to clear out all ambition from our psyche for a period of time. Get into a comfortable position with a notebook and pen. Imagine a large, serene lake with mountains in the background. Out of the lake protrude several black spikes of metal. These are large and clearly visible and they represent our ambitions. It may be helpful to see the spikes in a row from shortest to tallest in order to better keep track of them. Sit and meditate on the feeling of wanting to clearly see and feel what you are and what you want to create out of your own natural passion. See the spikes as blockages to reaching this feeling that will fall away as you focus on what you want.
As you meditate the spikes will gradually fall away into the water and disappear. But as you focus on each spike as an impediment, you will receive an emotional sense of what that particular ambition is. Make a note of it in your journal. By identifying these ambitions you can consciously examine them later on and decide if they are really serving you.
When you reach the point where the lake is cleared of visible spikes simply meditate on that feeling for a few minutes and let it develop. Then, take notes in your journal as ideas and desires come to the surface. Use this as a time to feel inspired. What would you like to do and how would you like to feel about doing it? Something that makes you feel passionate and alive will eventually emerge. Be patient as we have all been programmed to not think in this way to some degree. You may need to repeat this exercise several times over a period of days to start producing creative ideas.
You can see that living this way is not to be �unambitious� in the sense of being lazy and defeatist. Rather, it is a dynamic, active and passionate way of life. Do what you love and a fulfilling life will follow.