The Great and Ancient Secret – Part Eight
The Liberated Mind
Most of us are raised and live within enormous limitations. In this way our innate genius and creativity is stunted, trampled on, or held back in some way.
The limitations may differ with each of us. While involved in creative workshops I was often able to observe people learning to sing. I heard people in middle life say that when they were a child a teacher had told them they couldn’t sing and had no singing voice. They had never attempted to sing since.
Taken in a general way, that happens to many of us. Somewhere along the line we have learned or been told that we are not capable, we haven’t got the talent, who are we to think we could achieve things; or perhaps our performance according to tests set by a commercially oriented world suggest we are lacking something – and so we do not sing our song.
For many however, events in childhood and our education have formed the enormous barriers we face.
Such barriers to unfolding who we are extend far beyond that however. We live in a world where a tiny portion of the population own most of the wealth and property. So we may see our economic status as a barrier. We have also been educated in a society that has been developed in ways to control, segregate, and manipulate. David Korten, in his book The Great Turning, a book that spells out in detail the way people are trying to break away from the forces of Empire and International Business governing their lives, says:
The real intention of the United States was articulated in U.S. State Department Policy Planning Study 23, a top-secret document written in 1948 by George Kennan, a leading architect of the post-World War II world:
“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population… In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity… To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our intention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives… We should cease to talk about vague… unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
He goes on to say, on his website:
“The corporate consolidation of power is merely a contemporary manifestation of ‘Empire’: the organization of society by hierarchies of domination grounded in violent chauvinisms of race, gender, religion, nationality, language, and class. The result has been the same for 5,000 years; fortune for the few and misery for the many. Increasingly destructive of children, family, community, and nature, the way of Empire is leading to environmental and social collapse.”
As I said at the very beginning of this series, ‘Virtually every society up to our present time has been built on a hierarchy. The upper levels of the hierarchy usually do everything in their power to maintain their advantage. To do so they live on the work and productivity of those in the lower levels of the hierarchy. In the U.S. and the UK today, recent figures show that the gap between the very wealthy, the middle and lower wage earners has widened enormously in the last 20 years. The struggle is still on to maintain the status quo.
A Boston Globe cartoon shows two bosses in a fancy office saying to three workers: “Why should you have a minimum wage – We don’t have a maximum wage.”
From the end of the 1970’s till the end of the 1990’s the income level of the lowest fifth of workers in the US fell from $9300 to $8700. The middle earning rose from $31,000 to $33,200. The highest earners rose from $256,000 to $644,000 in the same period. Also the length of life, health and opportunity within those groups also reflected their income. So the children of those at the highest level were much more likely to live longer and be rich in adulthood than those at lower income levels.
That, I am sure, constitutes a class system in the US, producing many of the inequalities we saw in work opportunity, personal well being, and wealth in the past in Britain. In the UK it is called class. In the US the same thing is called – money; wealth!
In the past, becoming conscious of this system, and showing signs of freedom from it, often meant death. It was wise to keep the organisations, the teachings and the techniques that led to freedom of mind and spirit Secret.’ Today there is a huge shift in the paradigm people live within. Like the goldfish in the first illustration, people are leaping beyond the social, political and racial stereotypes and habitual attitudes and worldview they have inherited. We can now more openly move to personal liberation. See Programmed
I have spent most of my life gradually finding my way out, and helping others find their way out of the limitations built into us, or placed on us – perhaps even by ourselves. The struggle has been to emerge from the influence of generations of our forebears being raised in religious, national and political systems of control and threat; immersion in and education by a system developed around class, (social or economic); being trained to believe in and conform to a way of life that reflects huge distortions of who we are and what the universe and the world is. Such training is usually called education or religious training. For instance I was born in a small country town where men and women were burnt at the stake for daring to read their own bible.
Added to that are personal psychological injuries to our psyche brought about because, as said above, we are raised in a system that reflects huge distortions in understanding who and what human beings are.
Having said that, I do not have a view of the world to sell you or promote to you – other than what I have just said. What I have come to understand is that each of us have our own wonderful genius that will tell us what we need to know about the world and ourselves. It is dynamic and responsive to what faces us in life and the system in which we live. When it is active in your life it brings enormous creativity and innovation to what you do. So all I want to attempt is to show you ways you can gradually drop the barriers that have prevented you from knowing yourself in that way. I want to see if I can help you recognise those barriers and then move beyond them into the wonderful experience of the liberated mind.
Questions you need to ask yourself
The very first step in finding liberation is to become aware of the things that prevent it. So give time to the following questions. Don’t rush through them. Take days or even weeks with each one. Dropping away the limitations that may have taken generations to be built into you takes time and work.
Question One
Recently I was involved as an observer and participant in a workshop run by a capable and intelligent woman. It was obvious as she worked that she was mature, well balanced, with a lot of integrated life experience. Afterwards, as we were parting, I said to her, “You are a lovely woman.” Immediately and with some energy she said, “No I’m not!”
She had a built in response to deny her own beauty and capability. So the first question to ask yourself is –
What am I denying of myself?
This question can be framed in a number of ways. Carl Jung put it in another way by say, “What am I editing?”
We deny or edit in all manner of ways. We might have a habitual inner voice that tells us how inadequate we are, or what a failure we are. I worked with one woman who was gradually learning to recognise the things that were holding the best in her back. She told me as we worked, “It is amazing how we are so influenced by what our parents tell us, carrying it around with us, not realizing how much it affects how we live out our lives into and throughout adulthood. And it is amazing how we can come to know we aren’t what they say we are, yet there it is holding us back in some way. I hold back because so deep within me is the fear that I might be wrong.”
Another woman I worked with was constantly humilated at school. Not only was she humiliated when she got soemthing wrong, but also when she got something right.
For many of us, our parents were raised and educated in a social situation that was deeply controlled by political or religious do’s and don’ts, the domination by authority figures or the threat of unemployment. They may thus have raised us in the same way, a way helping us to deny any spark that would make us stand out. To survive they had to conform, and often they passed that terrbile lesson on to us.
But we also do it to ourselves by comparing our body, our social standing, our wealth or some other factors with those who appear more attractive, popular or successful.
From such past events, from failure in the system, or humiliation or abuse, we develop deeply engraved habitual responses to people, opportunity and events.
So, how are you denying yourself? What are you not daring to do? What are you not worthy of? What is wrong to think or feel?
See Opening to Life – Opening yourself to your bigger You