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

  This book does not tell you what you should or should not do. If you apply the clarity and drive of your feelings, your actions take your relationships, family and work into a higher complexity of order. By reclaiming your center and avoiding being hooked into emotional reaction patterns, you will find yourself with an abundance of energy resources that were previously consumed by low drama. This energy is now available to use for serving a purpose greater than mere survival. As your Gremlin learns to trust that you will conscientiously feed it, he remains alert and dedicated to accomplishing the interesting jobs you provide.

  With your extra attention and energy you can expand your immediate circle of friends by connecting heart and soul with other agents of change. There are fifty million cultural creatives out there in the world, working independently at the fringes of modern culture. When you connect with them by phone, email, and in-person conversations, you weave strands in a system of influence for the emergence of next culture on planet Earth.

  The emergence of next culture is self-organizing—as long as you do the jobs that the universe drops onto your bench. The universe does not waste resources. If the universe puts a job on your bench to do, even if you have never done it before, the universe already knows that you can do it. In my experience, you can trust that. In my experience you can trust the universe about this more than you can trust your Box’s screaming reaction attacks.

  FACILITATING THE SHIFT TO NEXT CULTURE

  If you have read this far then one of the jobs on your bench is helping the people around you during their shift into next culture. You are ahead of them. You have been going first. You have begun feeling your feelings about the disintegration of the known. Somebody has to feel because most people won’t. When circumstances collapse and denial can no longer numb their senses the shock will hit them and they will not be prepared. It is then that they will need your help.

  MAP OF FIVE PHASES OF EMBRACING CHANGE

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

  It is shocking to adjust to change. Whether you must deal with the restaurant being out of clam chowder or the planet being out of oil, you will go through these five phases of embracing change. These five phases do not necessarily occur in a linear order, nor are they necessarily completed the first time through. You may randomly slip from one phase to another during your journey toward acceptance. There is no right way to do this. Depending on the significance of the change, a healthy acceptance process may take anywhere from two minutes (e.g., the store is closed) to two or more years (e.g., death of a loved one, divorce, culture change). It helps to trust the process and to share what you are feeling with others who listen well.

  1. DENIAL – Fear. Shock. Avoidance. Paralysis. Trying to ignore the change: This is not happening to me! Something is wrong. It’s not true.

  2. OUTRAGE – Anger. Threatening. Demanding: How dare you! This is not okay with me! Stop it, now! It must stay how it was before!

  3. BARGAINING – Mixed feelings. Using the mind. Trying to be clever. Maneuvering: There must be a way out. Let’s make a deal. Undo this.

  4. DESPAIR – Sadness. Giving up hope of making any difference. Depression: Oh no! Oh God! This is too much for me.

  5. ACCEPTANCE – Being where you are. Choosing what is. This is the first moment of regaining your power to take responsible actions. There is joy.

  Which stage are you in now? And now?

  This thoughtmap was originated by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying, first published in 1969. She named it The Five Stages of Grief or The Grief Cycle, and applied it to thanatology. It turns out that her clarity about humans adjusting to change applies to all transitions.

  If you arrange to meet with people in an ongoing group you can use this book as a guideline for learning to consciously feel. While going through the changes it will help to have one more thoughtmap, the Map of Five Phases of Embracing Change, originally developed by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

  IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE PERFECT

  If you do 100 percent of the experiments in this book . . . Hey, buddy! Don’t kid yourself! Nobody does 100 percent of the experiments in this book. Not even me. Perfection is not necessary in order to do the jobs that the universe places on your bench.

  You are not perfect. The material world is not perfect. If you wanted to you could decide right now to stop using the fear that you might not do it perfectly as an excuse to avoid doing the jobs on your bench.

  Face it. No matter how expertly you declare and hold space for your Bright Principles to do their work in the middleworld the spaces will never be perfect. The floor of your meeting room might not be vacuumed. There might be rambunctious kids around. You might not be as eloquent as you think someone else could be. You might get hooked by an inferred insult. So what? This is the middleworld. It can’t be perfect.

  It is admirable to strive for impeccability, to start on time, to identify potential low dramas and slide past them, to be kind, to avoid Gremlin feeding during meetings, to energetically clean a space with a Black Hole after you end a meeting, and so on. These practices will develop over time as you become more and more sensitive to the consequences of not doing them.

  It helps tremendously to know that since your work spaces cannot be perfect, they also do not have to be perfect.

  If you declare your work space to exist for the purpose of serving your Bright Principles then the work that you do in that space, even though it is not perfect, will be as good as it gets.

  It turns out that as good as it gets is good enough. As Lee Lozowick says, “Good enough is good enough!”

  MAP OF THE INTERSECTION OF WORLDS

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

  Trying to make the middleworld perfect is not your job; besides, it is impossible. The middleworld is inherently imperfect. Your job is to call Bright Principles into your work space. Your work then manifests as an intersection of worlds. You become the space through which the Principles that you serve can do their work in the middleworld. What happens in this space will never be perfect. But it will be as good as it gets. And it is good enough.

  WHAT TO DO

  There is a next culture. When you discover it yourself, your first urge may be to try to tell others about it. But the others won’t be able to hear you, just as you could not hear the ones who tried to tell you before now. People can only shift to next culture when their matrix is ready to hold the new distinctions.

  Your next urge might be to try to transform modern culture into next culture.

  It can save you a big headache to realize that paradigms are unique species. One paradigm cannot be transformed into another paradigm, because a paradigm is what it is. Paradigms cannot shift, but you can. Consciously feeling your feelings changes you. It builds energetic matrix in you personally that permits you to suddenly function in a different paradigm. No one can do this for you, and you can’t do it for anyone else.

  Awareness expands from feeling more and more deeply the pain of consequences. What can you do to facilitate the shift to next culture? Feel the pain of consequences.

  For example, if a businessman feels the outrage, anxiety and sadness he causes in local citizens when he gets control of public water rights and raises domestic prices to make a profit, he could not proceed. By feeling the pain of consequences the businessman would no longer be in the same paradigm where quarterly stock reports make sense. He would be in a new paradigm.

  If a sales rep or manufacturer of plastic disposables feels the grief and shame of selling the plastic bottles and grocery bags that contribute to the Texas-sized dead zone of partially decomposed plastic choking life out of the albatross chicks on Midway Atoll in the North Pacific (see ), she could not go to work in the morning. She would find another profession.

  If a hamburger flipper at a McFastfood chain store feel
s the maniacal greed behind clearing tropical rainforests one acre per second, exterminating species faster than the dinosaurs died out sixty-five million years ago, merely to plant more soy beans to feed more beef cattle for the hamburgers he is serving, he could neither work there nor eat the fast food himself.

  If a miner, manufacturer, transporter, or user of uranium weaponry felt the relentless agony of parents who gave birth to a baby with deformities because they were exposed to DU (as a soldier or civilian—on “our” side or “their” side . . . radiation poisoning has no political or religious preferences) or of parents who got cancer themselves and would leave their children without parents, the worker would quit his job immediately and do everything he could to stop the government-ordained but illegal proliferation of these materials, and would force the cleanup of contaminated sites.

  MAP OF CULTURAL RESPONSIBILITY

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

  Where are you on this scale of taking responsibility for the culture you live in?

  7. I invent new culture. I design and implement social pilot models in the world. I link up with other social pilot models and weave the system of influence for the emergence of next culture, archearchy.

  6. I join an alternative social system with a culture having a different context (a different set of distinctions) than the context of mainstream culture. I can now shift from context to context, yet I prefer to live in my new culture.

  5. What? There is something beyond the system?! It is possible to go beyond the system and still survive? There are others already out there?! My fears have become the gateway to adventure. I can explore and discover.

  4. I have been fighting the system but I cannot beat the system. I can change myself but the system does not change. Like they say, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Or?

  3. Oh, my God! There is a system! Not only are there wolves (politicians), there are also pigs (businessmen)! They are collaborating to shear us sheeple. It is a conspiracy! I must fight the system!

  2. Something is not fine here. I feel angry, scared, and sad – I feel betrayed, confused, distrustful. I want to create, but hey! There are wolves around! I must hide out and learn how to survive.

  1. Everything is fine. I stand numbly in line with the rest of the sleeping sheeple. I give my responsibility away. I give my center away. I give my authority away. I am good at keeping myself in denial. After all, it could be worse . . .

  If a modern consumer felt the stunning nightmare of losing the once exquisitely beautiful tropical reefs due to ocean acidification produced by automobiles, ships, airplanes and coal-fired electric power plants, she would cease driving her car, buying imported foods and clothing, vacationing in faraway lands, and would never turn on an electric light that was not powered by solar or wind.

  If an adult man or woman felt quaking fear about the thousand gigaton planet-killer methane time bomb about to explode out of the Siberian tundra and shallow continental shelves due to global warming, and if that man or woman recognized there was a chance to defuse that bomb by abandoning almost every aspect of modern culture, they would not hesitate one moment to just stop. They would leave modern culture behind without regard for the uncertain consequences of leaving modern culture behind, because those consequences, whatever they might be, pale in comparison to letting modern society devour the future of humanity into oblivion.

  I AM A BRIDGE TO NEXT CULTURE

  What if you decided to use your daily life as an experimental laboratory for implementing elements of next culture? What if you decided to connect with people who are offering to be a bridge for you to get over into next culture?

  There are all kinds of bridges. There are people who know how to grow and preserve beans, how to make passive solar living environments out of old tires (see ), how to deliver authentic ritual for consecrating rite of passage to adulthood. These people are bridges. What if you decided to learn from them and take steps across those bridges?

  What if after awhile you decided to help other people to next culture by being a bridge yourself?

  This is a time when courageous experimenting is required for humanity to make it through to the next century. Even more, this is a time for courageous experimenters to come together in community. For if the universe is holographic—as so many researchers confirm—then single individuals do not contain precise enough intelligence to create new opportunities out of today’s complex circumstances. When people come together in bonded community, however, their intelligence can synergize. What if you started bringing pieces of the hologram together in a weekly meeting of next-culture experimenters?

  The purpose for coming together in the radically responsible self-governing context of next culture is far from the familiar purposes of profit, competition, Gremlin-feeding power struggles, or mere distraction. The ship of civilization may be going down, but in your weekly meeting you are gathered together building bridges to next culture. Your purpose is to cointention a bright future through unfolding the full potential of every human being, to change the morphogenetic field of the human race. The meeting itself is a bridge. Each time you come together people take steps together and move further beyond modern culture’s horizon.

  Humanity has already crossed into uncharted territory. The future is unknown. Do not be too concerned about “the powers that be” getting upset about your experimenting. There are already too many heretics to keep track of. Your experiments actually serve modern culture by providing revolutionary spirits with something peaceful and productive to do: design and build bridges to sustainability.

  Supporting a healthy and diverse ecology of sustainable microcultures could be the smartest insurance that any predominant culture could carry. As the ship of state goes down, the once proud protagonists may eventually come knocking at your door. When they come, you can smile kindly and say, “Hello. Welcome to the bridge. What are you feeling?”

  Bridge builders who bring people together in autonomous next-culture enterprises, resilient organizations, and self-governing ecovillages are no different from yourself—spirited yet humble, courageous yet pragmatic, visionary yet relational. Finding your way to next culture is a natural consequence of liberating and applying the strength and intelligence of your conscious feelings . . . being no longer numb.

  Welcome to the bridge. What are you feeling?

  APPENDIX A:

  LIST OF THOUGHTMAPS

  PAGE

  1. Map of the Adult Ego State 190

  2. Map of Authentically Hitting Bottom 210

  3. Map of Being Centered 90

  4. Map of the Black Hole 270

  5. Map of the Box (Box Technology) 57

  6. Map of the Box’s Resistance to Change 59

  7. Map of Changed Results 30

  8. Map of Child and Adult Responsibility 181

  9. Map of Communication: Blocked 220

  10. Map of Communication: Completed 221

  11. Map of Communication: Incomplete 218

  12. Map of Communication Layers 223

  13. Map of Comparing Cultural Attributes 313

  14. Map of Cultural Responsibility 324

  15. Map of Detecting Messages 225

  16. Map of Double Spaceholding 274

  17. Map of Evolving Thoughtmaps 31

  18. Map of Exercise to Gain Feelings Consciousness 167

  19. Map of Feelings and Archetypes 257

  20. Map of Feelings Intensities 165

  21. Map of the First Copernican Revolution 187

  22. Map of Five Phases of Embracing Change 320

  23. Map of Four Bodies 49

  24. Map of Four Feelings 100

  25. Map of Four Feelings – Old 67

  26. Map of Four Feelings – New 149

  27. Map of Four Kinds of Intimacy 54

  28. Map of Four Kinds of Messages 226

  29. Map of the Four Step Learning Spiral 44

&n
bsp; 30. Map of Giving Your Center Away 90

  31. Map of Having Two Views at the Fringe 300

  32. Map of Hint for Learning to Feel 108

  33. Map of How I Know I Am In a Low Drama 203

  34. Map of How to Authenticate Inauthentic Feelings (from others) 121

  35. Map of How to Avoid Low Drama 204

  36. Map of How to Clear Resentment 235

  37. Map of How to Complete Incomplete Feelings (from the past) 126

  38. Map of How to Consciously Feel 113

  39. Map of How to Unmix Mixed Feelings 159

  40. Map of the Intersection of Worlds 322

  41. Map of Is-Glue and Is-Glue Dissolver 139

  42. Map of the Liquid State 147

  43. Map of Low Drama 69

  44. Map of Low Drama and High Drama Feelings 209

  45. Map of Low Drama Detector 202

  46. Map of Mixing Feelings 152

  47. Map of Modern Educational Distortions 51

  48. Map of the Numbness Bar – Old 34

  49. Map of the Numbness Bar – New 40

  50. Map of Numbness vs. Feeling 12

  51. Map of Parent, Adult, Child Ego States 189

  52. Map of Phase 1 and Phase 2 of Feelings Work 169

  53. Map of Population Overshoot 186

  54. Map of Possibility 281

  55. Map of the Present Epochal Culture Shift 307

  56. Map of Responsibility and Culture 28

  57. Map of Rewiring the Feeling of Fear 146

  58. Map of the Second Copernican Revolution 187

  Map of Stellating Archetypes 248

  Map of Technopenuriaphobia (TPP) 246

  Map of Technopenuriaphobia Healing 247