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

  3. Society promotes the idea that you should have a strong image of who you are. But change starts with entering the liquid state where you cannot have a solid identity for a while, a state that society labels as crazy. Society markets the belief that it is definitely safer to avoid change.

  4. The process of entering and owning your shadow world adds awareness but undermines your Box’s old self-image. Nothing much from your Box will help you through your underworld journey, but if the Box feels useless it can freak out. Having a hysterical Box can seem threatening enough to give up this whole wish to consciously change. Perhaps it’s better to stay in normal life.

  These and other forces stand between you and going through the changes involved in learning to consciously feel. The obstacles to begin and the obstacles along the way can seem formidable. That is because they are formidable. They need to be formidable. The power involved in authentic change needs to be greater than the Box’s power to keep things the same or there would be no such thing as growing up. The question that stands before you is, do you choose the challenge of growing up?

  VERBAL REALITY AND EXPERIENTIAL REALITY

  Another of your first steps in learning to consciously feel will be to make a particular distinction in your relationship to the world. The distinction is between verbal reality and experiential reality. You make the distinction by separating your physical body from your intellectual body, or more precisely, loosening your intellectual body’s grip over your physical body’s interaction with the world.

  Without your consent, modern culture hammered you into a tiny section of the universe called verbal reality. You were bombarded with words from your very first days. Loud talking heads loomed close in your visual field, radio and television pestered your ears. Advertisements, media, and the printed word surrounded you wherever you were. Everyone important to you was impatient for you to break off the being-to-being contact and enter their world of verbal communications. People weren’t willing to relate to you unless you started using the names they gave you for things. Instead of sharing in your wondrous, wordless, wide-open perspectives, people pushed objects into your face and said, This is a ball. See? Ball! B-A-L-L. Can you say that? Ball! As soon as you speak your first words you are finally recognized as joining the human race.

  Reading, writing and arithmetic, the focus of school, the focus of civilization itself, all involve diminishing your four body experience of the world to symbols of your experience of the world.

  Incessant external conditioning forces your intellect’s vocabulary to supersede your direct physical experience. At some point you surrender and are trapped. You might even remember the moment when your innocence was stolen away, when you gave up the real world in exchange for being accepted by your parents, older siblings and teachers. Within a short time you hardly experienced anything you did not have words for, and experiential reality drifted away.

  Since the vast majority of people in modern civilization were also reduced to living in the same verbal desert as you were, the dreadful price you have paid goes unrecognized. You are thus cut off from the nuance of your feelings, separated from your instinct, made stranger to your amazing knacks and natural talents, sapped of your passions, stolen from your true destiny, made fearful of your imagination, intuition and innovation, and blocked from the direct experience of both extraordinary and archetypal love.

  MAP OF VERBAL REALITY vs EXPERIENTIAL REALITY

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

  What is bigger, the set of things you have words for, or the set of things without words? Obviously, the wordless world is far greater. Limiting yourself to the miniscule territory of verbal reality excludes you from vast areas of experience for which you have no words. Reclaiming the ability to enter experiential reality is monumental. For example, women confide with dismay that it is almost unheard of in modern culture for a man to actually experience his experience. Men have retreated into their heads instead. With guided practice it is possible to have both verbal and experiential options.

  The unspeakable mystery of life has now been squeezed into a wiki website, guarded by jealous computer-smart intellectuals who claim possession and dominion over their particular bit of correct knowledge.

  Verbal reality creates the wall of your numbness. The question I am asking is this: Are you ready to come back to life? Are you willing to tear down the wall?

  Imagine the following demonstration. A courageous but somewhat anxious man volunteers to step to the front of the training room. I ask him to face the audience and pay close attention to what happens next. He is keenly alert as I gently press my fist into the side of his upper arm.

  After a moment I ask, “What happened?”

  He says, “You touched my arm.”

  I wait a moment to see if anything else comes from this shining exhibition of twenty-first century intelligence. I have waited a hundred times during this same demonstration. Nothing more ever does.

  The man has been to school. He assumes he has found the correct answer and waits for the teacher’s confirmation.

  I turn to the audience and say, “This is a perfect demonstration of verbal reality.”

  The audience has no idea what I am talking about, yet. They have also been to school. Each person sitting in the audience is locked into the same verbal prison as this man. To their mind, what happened is exactly what the man said. I touched his arm. How could it be anything else? Of course that is what happened.

  Then I ask the man to stay with me as I draw and explain the Map of Verbal Reality vs Experiential Reality on a flip chart board. I carefully make each distinction and at the end I ask him if he understands the map.

  He says, “Yes.”

  I say, “Good. I would like you now to shift from verbal reality to experiential reality. Are you ready?”

  He considers this for a moment and then says, “Yes.” His answer is tainted with no small amount of uncertainty. That uncertainty creates the possibility of the shift. The secret of making shifts is to commit before you know how.

  I have the man face the audience again. After a moment I press my fist into his arm exactly as I did a few moments before.

  There is a pause. He seems to be noticing something. His eyes slightly glaze over, wandering off in a manner that is unusual for him. His attention goes inward. He sinks into his body, falling away from the hypnotic grip of his intellectual vocalizations.

  There aren’t thoughts in this man anymore. He has gotten out of his head. The shift to experiential reality has occurred. In this very moment he is experiencing his experience and the space of the entire room shifts.

  The audience feels it. There is awed silence. People look on in wonder. A new man is standing before them now where the verbal reality man used to be. Especially those who have known this man for years are touched.

  This new man seems somehow deeper and richer, more sensuous, less defined, more flexible, less confined, more alive, less predictable. This new man clearly accesses a vaster world of possibility than he did before. He is no longer straight jacketed by his vocabulary. One by one the audience members regain a long-forgotten hope for themselves. If this man can reclaim his direct experience of the world, perhaps they can too. All of this happens in a sustained wordless moment.

  Then I gently ask the man, “What happened?” It is the identical question I asked him before.

  He does not answer immediately. His intellectual body is no longer in charge so he does not have to answer according to the logic and timing of his mind. He can wait and answer the question if and when and how he chooses. He has his power back, having repossessed it from the tyranny of his intellect.

  He seems slightly perturbed by my request for words, but then something happens. A new function emerges in him—a function whereby he can stay centered in the wordlessness of his direct experience while at the same time he can use a portion of his intellect to grope around for some so
rt of words. He will use the words as building blocks to construct a bridge directly from his body to the audience’s body so they can share the experience of his experience.

  He takes a four-bodied breath and says, “An impulse started in my right arm and flooded into my chest like a swarm of happy honey bees, humming and vibrating around in there. Pressure waves echoed down through my abdomen, waking up my inner cells, tingling down my legs and arms. Ripples are bouncing back and forth through my features, like a song sung free and loud in the mountains. There is orangeness and sweetness in my fingertips. Also in my toes. I still feel it. My ear-lobes are warm. My hair is electrified with aliveness charge. I can see more clearly, as if a fog has melted away, as if my eyes perceive in new sorts of frequencies. I can see love in you people who are looking at me now. We are in this experience together and it is okay for me to share about it, even if what I say sounds completely crazy.”

  Tears are rolling out of the man’s eyes. It does not bother him. He could keep painting the experience but he chooses not to. He stands there vulnerable and delighted in his experiential wonder, looking at the people as if he had never seen faces before. He has missed this for so long. The door is again open wide to a world he has not explored since childhood, a world that was almost forgotten. He takes slow deep breaths and can’t stop smiling. He looks over at me with gratitude, not for me but for the experience he is having, and the audience spontaneously starts clapping with joy and appreciation.

  This is experiential reality. Are you ready for this?

  3. UNCONSCIOUSLY FEELING

  Modern culture asserts that it is not okay to feel. You are told and shown in both subtle and overt ways that feelings are as improper as farting in public. Feelings may accidentally burst out sideways from time to time and hurt the people dearest to you, but even if that accident happens regularly you are permitted to apologize for your impoliteness.

  Having a feeling means there is something wrong with you. Modern society solves the problem of feelings by sending you to a doctor or psychiatrist who is more than willing to add you to the list of millions of men, women and children agreeing to take mood-altering drugs.

  The conflict between having a body full of feelings and yet having it not be culturally acceptable to feel creates physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual confusion. It can fill you with self-doubt, even self-hatred, and produces profound hesitation about daring to be yourself. This uncertainty makes you weak and confused, assuring that the patriarchal empire of modern culture can continue unhindered. You acquiesce, and teach your children to do the same.

  Animals have feelings. You can detect when a dog or cat or horse feels scared, angry, glad, or sad. As zoologist Desmond Morris observed in his 1967 book The Naked Ape, human beings are animals, too. Just like other animals, you have feelings. Feelings come with the body.

  But modern society promotes the myth that human beings are superior to animals. This myth has been integrated so deeply into your worldview that you forgot it is a myth. You believe it to be true. Modern culture mass-produces chickens, pigs and cows just like it mass-produces toasters, cars and mobile phones. Animals are regarded as little different from things. If we did to humans the horrific things we do to animals, we would be locked away.

  A high dose of numbness is needed to maintain the assertion that humans are not animals.

  NOT OKAY TO FEEL GLAD

  Modern education about feelings is so distorted that we equate feeling good to feeling numb. We don’t actually want to feel happy. We want to feel numb. Numbness is good. This is what we encourage the teachers to teach our children. This is what you communicate to a child when you say, “Shhhh! It doesn’t hurt! Nothing happened!” Or when you act as if children should be seen and not heard. You communicate that it is better to have no feelings.

  After all, this is the age of science, the age of reason, the modern age of a great civilization, that has, by the way, overpopulated the planet, systematically exterminated and enslaved diverse cultures, ravenously consumed nonrenewable resources, contaminated the environment, and is on the fast track to self-extinction—not so much to be proud of, actually.

  This same civilization has taught you that it is not okay to feel angry because anger is dangerous, loud, and threatening. You might hurt someone or break things. You look bad when you express anger. You are out of control and uncivilized.

  You were taught that it is not okay to feel sad because sadness is weak, childish, emotional, and sappy. Sad people are pathetic. They are not “with the program” of being happy. There is something wrong with them. And besides all that, men don’t cry.

  You were taught that it is not okay to feel scared because fear is irrational. Fear causes panic, so you cannot be a leader. Fear shows immaturity, ignorance, incompetence and instability. Besides, James Bond feels no fear!

  You were taught that it is not okay to feel glad because people will become jealous. Being glad is childish, silly, loud and embarrassing. If you are glad, how can you be taken seriously? If you feel glad people will think you don’t have enough work to do. Or that you are on drugs. If you express true joy you appear ridiculous, pretentious, irresponsible, and foolish.

  What is this? Not even happiness is okay?

  In the back of your mind you have held the idea that there are three bad feelings (anger, sadness and fear) and one good feeling (joy). But when you actually examine what society has taught, feeling and expressing joy is as unacceptable as anger, fear and sadness!

  What happens if you walk down the street feeling extraordinarily glad? What is there to be glad about? Haven’t you read the news? Being glad is naïve. You must be an airhead, and stupid besides. Joy has no place in the real world. Do you think you are on holiday? Why bother feeling glad anyway? It will just go away.

  You have learned your lessons well. It is not okay to feel. Where does that leave you?

  OLD MAP OF FOUR FEELINGS

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

  LOW DRAMA AND GREMLIN

  Since you have a body, you actually do have feelings. But since it is not okay to feel you are in a bit of a bind. What are you actually doing with all this feeling energy coursing through your nervous system if you are not permitted to admit that you feel? How do you manage to stay unconscious of your feelings to give the appearance of being civilized? What happens with all of the energy tied up in your unconscious feelings?

  The answer to these questions is not generally known in modern culture. The answer is a radical piece of information.

  The answer is that the energy of your unconscious feelings feeds your Gremlin through low drama.

  What is low drama? Low drama is any action designed to avoid responsibility.

  What is Gremlin? Gremlin is the part in each of us that thrives on low drama.

  The Map of Low Drama distinguishes three roles that are played out in any dramatic interaction. The three roles are the victim, the persecutor, and the rescuer, each role being an aspect of Gremlin. Low drama is the unconscious expression of feelings.

  The most powerful position in a low drama is the victim. The victim’s power is clear: if no one plays the role of victim, there can be no low drama.

  The victim is the one who sets the stage for the persecutor to persecute and the rescuer to rescue. A skilled victim can make a persecutor or a rescuer out of anybody.

  All the victim needs is one small piece of evidence to prove that a person is hurting them and they can evoke a persecutor (“It was in your tone of voice! You didn’t even look at me! You should have been more human! You did not say goodbye when you left! You didn’t wait for me! You hurt my feelings!”).

  All the victim needs is one tiny reason to give away responsibility for themselves and they have created a rescuer (“I don’t know how to do it! I am so overwhelmed! You are better at this than I am! I don’t have enough time! I can’t find it! I can’t figure this out! I’ve b
een working so hard! My feet hurt! I’m so tired!”).

  MAP OF LOW DRAMA

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

  Low drama is any action designed to avoid responsibility.

  All three low drama roles serve Gremlin’s purposes. Notice the similarity between the persecutor and rescuer positions: both think that they are okay and the victim is not okay. The most powerful player in a low drama is the victim: if there is no victim, there can be no low drama! A skilled victim can make a persecutor or a rescuer out of anyone! Low drama seems real when you unconsciously change positions on the triangle. Anytime you are blaming, resenting, justifying, being right, complaining, or making someone wrong, it is low drama. The only thing that happens in low drama is you get older. Nothing changes for the better because responsibility is the procedure for change, and low drama is about avoiding responsibility. (Note: This thoughtmap is used with permission from Dr. Stephen Karpman who created the original drama triangle in 1965 and brought it into Transactional Analysis (TA) originated by Dr. Eric Berne . In 2000, Clinton Callahan connected the four feelings to the drama triangle and renamed it low drama so as to reveal its relationship to high drama on a bigger thoughtmap called The Map of Possibility, shown in Appendix C, and further explained in my book Radiant Joy Brilliant Love.)

  One particularly pernicious sort of victim is the victim who does ostensibly responsible things but does them as a victim. This is when you take out the garbage—which looks like a responsible thing to do—but you don’t truly choose to take out the garbage. Instead you take out the garbage because “no one else is doing it,” because “somebody has to do it,” because “it hasn’t been taken out for a really long time”; you get the idea. This sort of victim is called the responsible victim.