Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth Read online

  MAP OF UPGRADING YOUR FEELINGS THOUGHTWARE

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  YOUR ORIGINAL FEELINGS THOUGHTWARE:

  “Feelings are painful, bad, dangerous, uncivilized, childish,

  useless, frightening, stupid . . . and definitely to be avoided.”

  YOUR UPGRADED FEELINGS THOUGHTWARE:

  “Feelings are for healing things or handling things.”

  GUIDELINES FOR PSYCHOPATHS

  This section probably does not apply to you.

  This section only applies if you are in the 1 percent of the human population lacking a connection between your mind and your heart, resulting in a disconnect between feelings and thoughts. The name for someone in this condition is psychopath. People suffering from psycho-pathology lack remorse, empathy, compassion, the application of moral considerations to actions, and the ability to learn from mistakes.

  Without the basic conscience that allows a human being to live in social harmony, psychopaths cannot be authentically touched. Mental health professionals rarely treat psychopathic personality disorders as they are considered untreatable. No interventions have proven to be effective, not even punishment, because psychopaths do not associate punishments with the behavior that is being punished.

  The reason this section probably does not apply to you is that psychopaths derive satisfaction from their antisocial behavior and would not typically read a book about learning how to feel.

  Psychopaths tend to assume there is nothing wrong with them, and think (often rightly) that they are too smart to ever get caught. Learning how to feel would never make sense because why should you bother to fix something as successful as a CEO, a senator, a judge or a bishop?

  On the other hand, it could be that you are an atypical psychopath: you have noticed that something is missing and you want to try to find it.

  In addition to applying to the 1 percent of true psychopaths, this section may apply to you if you are in the 8–10 percent of chameleon psychopaths, modernized humans who see hierarchical power positions going to people with psychopathic behavior patterns so they adopt those patterns themselves. Chameleon psychopaths learn to survive in the service of psychopathic leaders by imitating their behavior and attitudes, pretending to be one of them. This way they gain power and status in the patriarchal empire without actually being a true psychopath, a common but risky strategy. The risk was identified by Kurt Vonnegut Jr in Mother Night, when he said: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

  Regardless of whether you are a true psychopath, a chameleon psychopath, or are merely interested in transforming the little psychopathic elements of your Box’s defense strategy, here is the deal: if you are willing to admit that you are missing the link between thought and feelings (or if you have been behaving as if the link is missing), you have a chance to live more humanly. The way to do it is to use your remarkable cunning to catch yourself at your own tricks. Only you are clever enough to do this.

  Turn your ruthlessness into ruthless self-honesty.

  Reveal your handicap pitilessly until your world crumbles around you and you hit bottom. Then do whatever it takes to stay there.

  Do not let your psychopathic certainty put itself back together again. Stay broken. Stay vulnerable. Stay in uncertainty, completely un-defended, because that which is authentic about you cannot be hurt.

  This is a long and pitifully lonely process, continuing over a year or two. The process can neither be shortened nor made more comfortable. I am truly sorry about that. In my thirty-four years of working with people, I have found no other effective way. Believe me, I have looked.

  The process of becoming more human needs to take its own time. It can help if you decide now, in this moment, to endure the process through to its completion no matter what.

  By already establishing a commitment you proactively disempower the clever reasons, excuses and justifications that the psychopathic Gremlin throws up as obstacles to your success. The previously established commitment gives the Gremlin’s arguments no place to get a grip. Put your faith in the process itself. Trust the process. And then work at it.

  During this time your job is to take care of yourself in these simple ways:

  • Stop trying to be in relationship with the opposite sex (or same sex if you are homosexual).

  • Eat simple healthy food in modest amounts, mostly vegetarian.

  • Strictly avoid alcohol, cigarettes, drugs, sweets, coffee, gum, and sodas.

  • Exercise daily, moving around until you have to breathe hard.

  • Sleep more than has been usual for you.

  • Learn some form of silent sitting practice and sit at least thirty-five minutes a day: same time, same place. No breathing exercises or mantra. Be still, keep your back straight, and don’t sleep. That’s it.

  • Participate in a regular weekly martial arts training program if you can. Classic aikido works well for this.

  • Take up a simple handcraft to give your body something useful to do when your mind is driving you crazy: hand sewing, wood carving, pottery, stained glass, macramé, beading, etc.

  • Make only small positive promises to people and be hypervigilant about keeping each one.

  • Do not engage in revenge, paybacks, or low drama, even in your own mind.

  • Buy almost nothing so you avoid debts.

  • Pay your bills on time or early.

  • Work a simple manual labor job that does not require your clever defense mechanisms to come back into play as part of your profession (such as headhunter, sales, manager, consultant, etc.).

  During this time you won’t know who you are. You won’t recognize yourself. Even your close friends might question your lifestyle. Life itself may not even make much sense. That is simply how it is in this time. I’m sorry.

  Only after nine to twelve months of relentlessly staying in an apparently broken condition—with your carefully orchestrated deceiving mechanisms hopelessly cracked and withered due to starvation and exposure to radical self-honesty—could you perhaps become reliable enough to ask for help. Asking for or accepting help before then won’t do you much good because your Gremlin will easily devour whoever offers to help you. This would be a bad idea.

  Help could at first be meeting with other men in an ongoing weekly men’s group (if you are a man, or women’s group if you are a woman). Try to avoid any groups that are new age or touchy-feely or religiously fundamentalist. The group should be simple and respectful of the value of human life. In such a meeting you would be asked to both listen a lot and share a lot. A fine example of this is the New Warrior Circle, a small local group of men that you can join after participating in the New Warrior Training. Information is available at the ManKind Project website .

  When the time comes to ask for help, ask if there is someone (or better, a team of two or three) neither psychopathic nor pseudopsychopathic who would be willing to be your “seeing eye dog” with respect to feelings. This would be a one- to two-year commitment.

  If someone commits to help you, your commitment to them should include a ritual vow in which you promise never to deceive them. For their help you must pay full price. The price is sustained defenselessness toward them—you are completely exposed. Regardless of the intensity of your screaming demons, you sacrifice your conscienceless survival power for the chance to taste what you have never before had: human intimacy.

  Your guide becomes a compass providing ongoing feedback about what you would naturally feel in each circumstance if your mind was connected to your heart, thereby giving you a conscience. Your guide’s feedback would initially address your subtle fast interactions, those which most people would not notice.

  Say, for example, that you enter a restaurant together. Your guide’s feedback might be a running monolog going something like this: “Wait. Don’t just march on into this space. It is not
your space. You are a guest here. Be interested. Notice while you enter the subtle mood that is created here. Each space has a unique mood about it. Appreciating these moods is one of the most satisfying experiences. If you skip over appreciating these mood sensations, you will be endlessly bored and wanting to get into trouble just for entertainment. Stop walking here. You are entering the restaurant space without being welcomed. Make brief eye contact with that waiter. That’s too long. You just put your energy into his space as a threat to try to control him. Don’t do that. Trust him for no reason. Take your energy out of his space and keep it in your own private bubble. That’s where it belongs. Good. Ground your bubble. Yes, like that. Now you are welcomed into the space. Keep yourself grounded as we walk. Do not even look at that woman. Her Gremlin is trying to hook your Gremlin for a little flirt. Don’t do it. Good. Keep breathing. That feeling coming up in you now, what is it? Yes, that is anger, about 15 percent intense. Do you know why? Because your intentions and actions are so visible and your Gremlin thought you were sneaking around all this time and you are not. Great, now you are lowering your barrier to me again and you are hitting bottom again. Good. Stay at bottom. You know what it feels like. Just relax there in the hopelessness. Ask yourself: Even here on the bottom, am I okay? Yes, you are totally okay, even if you are not in control. So here we are at the table. That seat is the one your Gremlin chose in order to put your back to the wall so you can flirt with anyone who might pass by. What if you choose a different seat to sit in? Fine. Yes, we are just sitting here waiting. Yes, the time is going by and you could get the waitress’s attention, but let’s just relax here and wait. You have the power to choose what the most important thing going on in this moment is. Is it getting our meal ordered? Or is it being here together in this space? Even if you are hungry, are you going to die of hunger? No, of course not. So what happens if you choose being here together with me? Can you feel something relax when you do that? The emergency suddenly passes. The survival demon goes back into its cave. You can rest in alertness even if it seems like nothing is happening. Here we are, just sitting together. And look, here comes the waitress! You scanned her entire psychoemotional state just now, did you notice that? How is she doing? Right, she is 30 percent tensed, carries a burden in her heart and left shoulder, tries to be nice, and hates men. Your Gremlin is ready to feed on that, can you feel it? Tell your Gremlin to SIT. Get your center back from your Gremlin. Take a breath. Be unreasonably kind to the waitress without motive. Act as if you are always this way. Speak in respectful politeness. That is too fast. Slow your words down. There is not enough caring in your attitude. This is a woman. She is not the mother who abandoned you. She is not the nun who whipped you at school. She doesn’t even know about these things that happened to you. She is just trying to take your order for lunch. Stop being at war with her. Modulate your voice differently so her dignity is respected. Good, that’s totally different, see? Skip the meat, it just makes you aggressive. Take another deep breath and get centered. Good. Smile just a little, but don’t look at her. Looking in her eyes is the way your greedy little Gremlin sucks out her energy for hors d’oeuvres. Skip all that. Keep it civil and conscious. Take your center back from your Gremlin. Yes, now we are waiting again. Notice what your fingers are doing. See your right foot tapping? Those are two different feelings, and you’re mixing them together. What are they? Yes, anger in your foot, and fear in your fingers. When you mix them together, what do you get? Yes, hysteria. This is why you work frenetically and drive your colleagues crazy; why you cannot, in fact, maintain collegial relationships. So what is the anger about? Yes, impatience, wanting to hurry things up. Because what happens if you just sit? Yes, see your fingers picking at each other now? The fear increases. So what is the fear about? Yes, afraid of not doing something. And what happens if you are not doing something? Yes, you get in trouble. See how this vicious circle from long ago won’t let you simply be present in your body? But see how your body actually has the feelings and provides you with feelings information and energy, but your mind does not grasp it and cannot use it? That’s the psychopathic disconnect. You’re doing great with all this, just being with me. And hey, look, here comes our soup! Don’t be looking at her crotch like that. Gremlin got hold of your eyes and attention again. See how fast it is? Say, SIT! If you don’t have your attention, Gremlin does. Take a breath. Get your center back from your Gremlin. Enjoy your meal.”

  Day in and day out, keep opening further to the person serving you as your feelings detector. Fiercely direct your own guile to catch and expose your own guile.

  You don’t have to do this shamefully, just relentlessly.

  Allow no deception to go unadmitted. Live in the constant uncertainty of not knowing what is respectful, what has integrity, what includes empathy or what generates true warmth. Be an ongoing request for guidance. Ask about each gesture, each thought, each word. Be willing to ongoingly not know. Radically trust your guide.

  Rely on your guide’s feedback even if you disagree with it, even if you do not understand it, even if you feel scared. You will feel scared. Consciously feeling scared is fantastic! Fear is one of the four feelings. You are getting somewhere.

  With each move, each expression, ask, “What should this feel like? What is the appropriate feeling here? Anger? Sadness? How should that feel? Frightening? Why should it feel like this?”

  Such ineptitude is maddening. Frustration is a form of anger. Aha! Anger is one of the four feelings. You have detected another feeling. Excellent! Keep going.

  You are blind. A blind person craves the company of one who can describe a panorama in poetry. Give your guide plenty of safe space and time to bring the world alive for you. Let them expose you to a world of conscience, a world that combines thoughts with feelings. If you are truly psychopathic, empathy and remorse will never be yours. But through respectfully listening to your guide with heart and soul, you can come to authentically appreciate the world of intimacy. Your patient attention will bring you nuance and pregnant moments, the possibility of wonder.

  After some time you may find yourself in a moment of joy, and then a moment of sadness, and then a moment of joy again. This is called gratitude: grateful to be alive, grateful that someone would care enough to help you connect, grateful to have a chance to experience life. Sadness and joy are also among the four feelings.

  Through a measured cadence your handicap can be transformed. You can use your own painful lack of remorse to serve another person. Your weakness becomes a chance for your guide to use their feelings in ways they never imagined. Through sacrificing your defendedness and trusting another human being, that person can occasionally function as an external living circuit for you, using their own conscience to bypass your inner void and help you join your heart with your mind. A richer world of experience can come together in you.

  The other person is serving as your conscience. You can learn to avoid acting until your conscience speaks. If you succeed, then between yourself and your friend you have nurtured a precious collaboration. Congratulations.

  RESPONSIBLY FEELING

  Entering adult responsibility requires a new thoughtmap about adulthood and a new thoughtmap about responsibility. Modern culture’s thoughtmaps for responsibility and adulthood are the equivalent of flat-world maps.

  Mainstream society teaches us that responsibility is a punishment and a burden that smart people avoid. For example, modern businessmen consider it to be a success when they maximize profits through externalizing costs. Yet where do they think they are externalizing costs to? We live on a planet. A planet is a closed ecological system. All externalized costs will boomerang with compounded interest. A radically new thoughtmap for responsibility is required to explain the steps for shifting from an economy of money to an economy of sustainable human well-being.

  MAP OF CHILD AND ADULT RESPONSIBILITY

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

/>   Responsibility is the personal interest and willingness to source the necessary results. We live in a responsible universe. When you get past all your resistance, reasons and excuses, what is left is personal interest. This starts an entirely new game, called adult responsibility.

  CHILD RESPONSIBILITY

  Responsibility is about what happened in the past.

  It is my fault. I am guilty.

  I must carry the blame.

  It is a heavy burden.

  I am the victim.

  I have been tricked.

  I am naïve.

  I am the scapegoat.

  It is being done to me.

  I should have avoided it.

  There will be consequences.

  I am held accountable.

  I will be punished.

  I have reproach, regret.

  This is a pressure.

  I am being abused.

  Others abandon me.

  I fear failing.

  I am overwhelmed.

  I am on trial.

  ADULT RESPONSIBILITY

  Responsibility happens here and now in the present.

  I own it. It is my commitment.

  I can ride it, play it, fly it.

  It is an opportunity to serve my interest.

  This is a reward.

  I am honored.

  I am at source.

  I am at cause.

  I am at the point of origin.

  I get to authentically create.

  I am active. I create results.

  I have freedom to choose.

  I am one with it, in integrity.

  I express care.

  Disillusionment opens new possibilities. I learn.

  I serve something greater than myself. I am being well used.

  It is an exchange.

  I have power to declare how it is.

  THE SECOND COPERNICAN REVOLUTION