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

  Map of Ten Distinctions for Consciously Feeling 98

  Map of Two Kinds of Emotions 117

  Map of Upgrading Your Feelings Thoughtware 173

  Map of Verbal Reality vs. Experiential Reality 61

  Map of the Voice Blaster 193

  Map of Ways to Leave Child Ego State and Enter Adult 196

  APPENDIX B:

  MAP OF TEN DISTINCTIONS FOR CONSCIOUSLY FEELING

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

  What would happen to your belief system, your self-experience, your defensive strategies, your abilities to communicate and relate, if you consciously applied these ten adult, responsible distinctions to feelings?

  TEN DISTINCTIONS FOR CONSCIOUSLY FEELING

  1. There are only four feelings: anger, sadness, fear and joy. All feelings fit into one of these four categories, or are mixtures of these four.

  2. There is a difference between thoughts and feelings. Thoughts come from your intellectual body’s mind. Feelings come from your emotional body’s heart.

  3. There is a difference between feelings and emotions. Feelings come from yourself in the present moment. Emotions are incomplete feelings that come from the past, or inauthentic feelings that come from some other person or organization.

  4. Feelings are absolutely neutral energy and information, neither good nor bad, neither positive nor negative. Feelings are feelings.

  5. Feelings serve you powerfully in their pure form, not mixed with each other. Mixed feelings include depression, hysteria, jealousy, despair, melancholy, shame, guilt, schadenfreude, and so on. To shift out of these mixed feelings, simply unmix them.

  6. Feelings can be experienced from zero to one hundred percent intensity. In each moment you are feeling all four feelings, but one is always bigger. This is what you are feeling.

  7. There are two Phases in feelings work. In Phase 1 you learn to detect and avoid low drama through consciously feeling neutral, unmixed, one hundred percent intensity feelings. In Phase 2 you learn to create high drama through consciously applying the vast information and energy resources of your feelings with adult responsibility.

  8. As an adult you can consciously integrate feelings into responsible speaking and listening so that feelings serve you relationally and professionally.

  9. Feelings work is part of a formal rite of passage that awakens (stellates) archetypal structures and talents that have been lying dormant within you, waiting to be turned on and used to fulfill your destiny.

  10. Stellated masculine and feminine archetypes form the basis of a new and truly sustainable culture (archearchy), oriented more towards being present and being with, and less towards consuming, owning, having, going and doing.

  APPENDIX C:

  MAP OF POSSIBILITY

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

  This is a map of what is possible right now.

  What you are doing right now is creating conscious or unconscious stories about what is.

  Without your storymaking, what is would have no meaning. This is not bad – it is how it is.

  The world is rich in evidence, so you can make up any story about anything.

  You do not make up stories for no reason. Every story has a purpose.

  You are either aware of the purpose of your story or you are not.

  If you are aware of the purpose of your story, then your actions serve conscious purposes.

  If you are not aware of the purpose of your story, your actions serve unconscious purposes.

  This map is not about good or bad. It is about conscious or unconscious creating.

  This map is inside of you. Each of us has a bright world and a shadow world. This map is not about good or bad, only about the kinds of results you want to create. The king or queen of your underworld is your Gremlin, which feels glad when someone else feels pain and serves Shadow (hidden purpose) Principles. The king or queen of your upperworld is archetypal man or woman, who feels glad when someone heals, learns, changes or succeeds, when the game is about winning happening and serves Bright (true destiny) Principles. When you have gained clarity about both your hidden purpose and your true destiny, what you get is the possibility of making a conscious choice about what you are creating right now. This can be a most useful choice.

  APPENDIX D:

  BAMBI VS. THE COLLAPSE OF CIvILIzATION

  This is a blog posted by Tim Bennett, a film maker living in northeast USA. Tim writes about making use of fear with rare and profound clarity. The original blog is available online at: http://carolynbaker.net/site/content/view/230.

  Tim wrote, directed and edited the film What a Way to Go – Life at the End of Empire produced by Sally Erickson.

  Tim’s writing is conversational Americanese, flamboyantly laced with 21st Century American slang and cultural referents. If you want further clarity about any of his terms, just google them. (For example, I just googled hoodies. They are heavy, upper-body garments with a hood, a hooded sweatshirt.) A good reason for reading Tim’s original blog online is that it includes an abundance of valuable links not included the text below.

  ORIGINAL BLOG POST – MONDAY, 26 NOVEMBER 2007

  The people I see engaged in effective response have all faced into, sat with, chewed on, and stared down their fear. This does not mean they are no longer afraid. It means that they have confronted their fears and found themselves more than a match for them. It means they have found their power to respond even when afraid, which is the definition of courage. They are still standing in the headlights, for there is no real place to hide, but they are not frozen. They are readying themselves for the blow, however and whenever it comes, responding, moment by moment, intuitively, rationally, non-rationally, and with heightened awareness

  Don’t be afraid to be afraid . . .

  —Yoko Ono, Beautiful Boys

  I have heard many astounding things in the four years since I began to make the documentary film What a Way to Go. The most astounding is this, which I have heard more than once, from real, living, seemingly intelligent and thoughtful people: “I refuse to be scared.”

  Imagine… refusing to feel one’s feelings. As if such a thing is ever really possible. As if such a thing is even a good idea. As if such a disconnection from one’s own body and one’s essential humanity, as if this core-directed attempt at control and domination, isn’t just more of the same. It’s a bit like “I refuse to feel pain” or “I refuse to feel hunger.” I mean, right on… pain and hunger can be a real downer, dude, so like, yeah, cool, groovy, far out, but like . . . um . . . shouldn’t you take your emaciated hand out of that fire? It’s starting to smoke.

  Many great thinkers have wondered, Kurt Vonnegut amongst them, whether the hypertrophied human cerebral cortex will ultimately prove to have been a bad idea, and whether it will be soon selected against in the grand Walkabout that is evolution. My guess is that, if that should be the case, if we do go the way of the Yangtze River Dolphin or the Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus Monkey (two species which have recently gone belly up in the shallow and quickly-warming end of the gene pool), it will be because this great, gray, wrinkled jelly-mold of an organ confers upon us the dubious ability to convince ourselves that we do not feel what we feel, and that we do not think what we think. To my mind, that’s about as good a working definition of insanity as we’re ever going to get.

  “I refuse to feel scared.” Could we ask for a more marvelous statement of willful denial than that?

  It’s understandable, of course. We live in a culture, and a system of governance and economy and production, that uses fear to control us. Just as it uses violence. Just as it uses power. And so, in the realms of power and violence and fear, we are left to stumble about at our most crazed and confused. Chafing under the dominating jackboot of the mortgage payment, the television commercial, the IRS form and our next empl
oyee review (what, did you think all dominating jackboots came hobnailed?), we seek to distance ourselves from any and all participation in such basic human animal responses as fear in the face of danger, or protection and defense in the face of attack: “Those bastards use fear and power to control us, goddamnit! No way am I going to let them make me be afraid!” In an attempt to “not become the enemy”, we wrap ourselves in cloaks of noble courage and righteous pacifism and hope that these thin fabrics will protect us.

  And why not? They HAVE protected us. If we’re rich, that is, or at least middle class. If we’re white. If we’re male. If we’re educated. If we’re first world. If we’re well-employed. Here in the Insulated States of America, much of our violence and power and fear, at least of the hob-nailed sort, has been outsourced, offshored and externalized so as not to upset us while we eat (bad for the digestion, you know). We on the top have been spared the most brutal and overt consequences of our actions for so long now that we have forgotten that there are any. We close our eyes and click our heels and zip up our NO FEAR hoodies and we’re good to go, confident that all that wishin’ and hopin’ will work today just like it worked yesterday.

  Which is, of course, why Peak Oil whacks us so devastatingly upside the head. Because when we begin to look closely at the situation, it becomes very clear, very quickly, that wishin’ and hopin’ are about to go the way of the Yangtze River Dolphin and the Miss Waldron’s Red Colobus Monkey in terms of effective life strategies.

  It burns, doesn’t it? It galls and vexes and maddens. I mean, isn’t this what we spent ten thousand years trying to control? Haven’t we worked long hours for low pay killing off everything we could that might chase us or bite us or poison us or eat us or claw us or irritate us or scare us or make us feel all creepy and oogly inside? Didn’t we arrange things so that we could know where our next meal is coming from, and where our warm bed will be at the end of the day? Aren’t we, by virtue of our millennia of effort, and by virtue of our exalted position at the very tip-top of the Great Chain of Being, actually and in no uncertain terms ENTITLED to not feel fear?

  Well, sorry, no, we’re not. We can’t have that. First, because that Great Chain is a load of horseshit (my apologies to horseshit, which, composted, can be really great for your garden), and second because our delusional attempts to control something as huge and complex and chaotic and self-directing and autonomous and sacred as THE WHOLE WORLD have succeeded only in pissing her off, and, as that great mall-rat-t-shirt says, “When Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy”. Knock knock. Who’s there? Climate change. Oh fuck.

  Some people, cognizant of how silly it sounds to actually deny their own feelings, will tweak things a bit, saying, instead of “I refuse to be scared”, something like “I refuse to live in fear,” meaning, I think, pretty much the same thing (though now avowed as an actual policy), but sounding much better. That this is said with high nobility of purpose and the best of intentions does not surprise me, for we are nothing if not well-intentioned. That it’s said with a straight face astounds me. Like . . . um . . . wouldn’t the only reason to actually “live in fear” be if there were something in our lives that was ongoingly frightening and threatening? And . . . I’m embarrassed to have to write this . . . if there’s something ongoingly frightening and threatening in our lives, don’t we actually want to know about it, and maybe, the gods forbid, respond? Isn’t that what fear is for?

  Maybe that’s not totally fair. Maybe it is. At some point, we have to do the work of teasing apart a healthy and useful feeling of fear from an unhealthy and useless feeling of worry, of fear mired in molasses and J-B Weld, which can be both debilitating and paralyzing. Perhaps it’s the difference between a creative response and a reaction. Fear has an inthe-moment quality to it, as a response to an immediate stimulus, and the possibility of openness and creativity exists therein. Worry has a long-term gnawing quality to it, as if fear has taken up a dwelling-place in our hearts, with plans to stay and eat all our potato chips, and there’s nothing we can do to get rid of it.

  We point to that ol’ deer-in-the-headlights as an example of the paralyzing effect of fear. Well, let’s think about deer for a second. I’ve met up with many of these “venisons of the deep” in my day, walking through the woods. When they hear me coming, they respond by running away. I’ve yet to have one stand there and let me walk up and pet it. Given the traditional choices afforded us animals, and knowing that fighting is probably riskier and may take more energy, and seeing an obvious escape route, the deer flees. Of course. Easy as pie. Deer ain’t dumb.

  But when I approach a deer encased in two tons of metal and glass and fine Corinthian leather, sometimes the deer takes the third option, the option that remains when fighting won’t work and there isn’t time to flee, or a place to flee to: it freezes. Not a bad strategy as a last resort, given the physiology of vision and the instincts of predators, but fairly useless against a Ford F-350 Super Duty diesel, or even a Toyota Prius. What works in the evolved world of lions and tigers and deers fails in the invented world of traffic and tramways and trucks. An oncoming pickup falls so far outside the traditional purview of a white-tailed deer that her first and most effective fear responses break down. Fight and flight appear to be out of the question and, unfortunately in this case, freeze doesn’t stand much of a chance. Traffic and tramways and trucks. Oh my.

  This, I think, is what some people are pointing to when they say they “refuse to live in fear.” They look at oil and climate and environmental meltdown and mass extinction and overshoot and economic and political insanity and they sense that, if things are really this dire, there’s no real way to effectively fight it (as in solving it . . . as in keeping this system going . . . as in SOL, dude . . . ), no clear place to which they might flee for safety (where could we go where they don’t hate us? . . . hmmm . . .), and they rightly surmise that freezing, in the face of something this huge, will probably not work either. What to do, what to do? There IS an ongoingly frightening and threatening presence in our lives. The coming storms lie so far outside of our purview that our traditional fear responses break down. We already know what usually happens to the deer. And being frozen in fear, apart from not working, really, really sucks. What to do?

  I know! Let’s refuse the situation. Let’s just say no to our own reality! In fact, let’s re-write reality. Let’s do like Captain Kirk did with the Kobayashi Maru training exercise and reprogram the simulator. After all, he didn’t believe in the no-win situation, so why should we? I mean, c’mon, people! We’re Americans, aren’t we? Damn straight! Lock and load! Let’s roll!

  Ahem . . . where were we?

  When we douse out the fear, when we tamp down the embers of worry, we unwittingly, and unfortunately, choose ingrained reaction over creative response. We fail to let the fear and worry do their work, the work of alerting us, not only to the fact that we are in danger, but also that this danger is huge and new and so dire that our normal responses will not serve us.

  Our culture in general (and those in power and control in particular) has used and abused fear and power and violence in order to manage our behavior and our beliefs, to sell us shit we don’t need, and to siphon off the material wealth of an entire planet. In reaction to that, rather than in creative response, we end up forced through tighter checkpoints and down narrower chutes, further and further into the pen. Reacting rather than responding IS a life lived in fear. Reaction is always constrained. It is always less free. The irony, for those who say, “I refuse to live in fear”, is that they already do, and that they probably always have. Refusing fear is a fear reaction to fear itself. (You came close, FDR, but no cigarette holder.)

  There’s a way in which the fundamental heart and spirit of my film What a Way to Go can be encapsulated in one short piece of voice over: “If what we want is to stop the destruction of the life of this planet, then what we have been doing has not been working. We will have to do something else.” Something else, as i
n something really else, as in “now for something completely different” else. Not the same old tricks in a new shade of muddy green.

  So what might that be, fellow deers? We’ve tried the Happy Chapter (TM), but that hasn’t seemed to “work” (I’m defining “work” as “somehow avoiding our headlong plunge into global mass extinction”). We’ve done the studies and written the books and convened the conferences and made the movies and, standing there in the glare of headlights, we’ve looked up at that big ol’ scary truck a’comin’, yes we have, yes we have. But then, because it’s so darned scary, and because everybody knows you can’t leave people afraid and upset, and because everybody knows that you’ve got to give people hope, man, you’ve just got to!, we’ve tacked on conclusions and chapters and benedictions and epilogues and dénouements that say, “Hey, things aren’t so bad. All we have to do is this-and-this-and-this and everything will be fine.” And the effect on us has been to put us back to sleep. I mean, if somebody has figured out the this-and-this-and-this, then surely they’re on it, right? So, I can get back to my shows, right? Cool. The truck? Oh, that. Yeah, don’t worry. There’s some guys in Colorado who have found the brake pedal.

  (If only we had stopped to wonder why it is this culture never actually DOES this-and-this-and-this. Here lies Humanity: They could have saved themselves, but they really sucked at follow-up!)

  We keep inching up to the edge of terror and hopelessness and despair, only to pull back and find solace in the arms of denial and false hope and slightly-less-unsustainable “green living.” Doing so hasn’t actually “worked.” So . . . now what? What comes next?

  Remember, the truck is still coming . . .

  I am reminded of an old children’s game we used to play in the one-room schoolhouse I attended in rural Michigan. One of us would lead and the rest would follow and we’d sit together and smack our hands on our knees and mimic the various motions and sounds as we went along. It was a hoot. Here, I’ll lead: