The Great and Ancient Secret – Part Nine

How Are You Holding Yourself Back?

What you deny in yourself, what you edit out of what you allow yourself to think and feel, is all part of how you might be holding back your own creativity, your own talents, and your own innate Secret.

Let us be clear about this. There are thousands of books on the market on how to succeed and become rich, or how to be a great lover or creative genius. Courses are run on the same subjects and to enter them you have to be rich anyway because they charge so much.

Mostly these are about techniques such as saying that to become rich you must save a percentage of what you earn, and then you must find ways make your money work for you, not you work for your money. Or to be a good partner or lover you must use sexual techniques, or learn to communicate with your partner honestly. You must learn to Make Love, not just do it.

But a lot of them simply tell you to hold the idea and feeling that you are a success, and to constantly visualise being wealthy, attractive, or successful.

Such instructions are fine and they may help you in some degree, but if you are all the time holding out on yourself, denying yourself, crushing your creativity, then you have less to bring to whatever else you do or try to achieve – or even what you have already achieved.

But The Secret is a step beyond those things. Again, let us be clear about this even at the cost of repetition.

From the early 1940’s onwards new tools were used in psychotherapy. Such psychotropic agents such as Ritalin and Psilocybin were used to plumb the depths and heights of human awareness. Never before had researchers, psychologists and psychiatrists been able to peer into the human mind and emotions so clearly. It was like having an x-ray or scanner of the human psyche. Such books as Stanislav Grof’s work, Realms of the Human Unconscious, describe what was found.

What was uncovered was extraordinary. Grof summed up his years of clinical experience by saying, ‘There is at present little doubt in my mind that our current understanding of the universe, of the nature of reality, and particularly of human beings, is superficial, incorrect, and incomplete.’

It was seen that not only do each of us have an inbuilt power and drive toward our own transformation and self realisation that is often blocked, but we have at our core the same power and potential that lies behind the emergence of our universe.

Perhaps that seems like an exaggeration. Maybe, but there are reasons why it appears like that. For one, the equipment you have is a big filter. Secondly, many of the other reasons have been explained above.

Taking the first – the equipment: consider for a few moments what life on this planet can do. It can fly, it can live under water, it can hibernate for months or years and then suddenly become active again. It can be incredibly small or amazingly big. It can express genius, cunning, aggression, love, great artistry, incredible memory and learning ability either as instinct or as learned skills.

Okay, I could go on, but think about it. Fundamentally Life is innately the same in all the varied creatures suggested above. It is just the ‘equipment’ – the body form – that enables one or the other things that Life can do. Birds fly and fishes swim because of the physical equipment they have. But Life has infinite potential, only parts of which are expressed in its living creatures.

You have a body form that has a lot of built in deficiencies, but also immense possibilities. You can’t smell or hear nearly as acutely as many animals. Your sight could almost be considered as blindness measured against the spectrum of light. You are quite weak physically when put against a chimpanzee. BUT – you have an incredible talent. With your self awareness you can look into the way you function and you can re-program yourself and transform the heritage you have been left by evolution, education and culture. You have the ability to self direct, and not just be a product of old instinctive drives. You can access your potential and help it unfold – a limitless potential. Mind and imagination can leap beyond boundaries – as we have done by creating machines that fly and telephones. But there are boundaries within us to leap beyond too.

More than anything else, your consciousness can turn away at times from the limitations of your senses, and when it does you can find an infinite ocean of awareness; a multidimensional cosmos of consciousness; a unfathomable source of information and creativity. See: Edgar Cayce.

Staying with Question One

Finding out how you hold yourself back is so important you need to stay with it for some time. To help clarify the question – to look at it from a different viewpoint – I will use a tree as an analogy.

A tree grows from a seed that is, compared with the tree’s mature size, tiny. So do you. The sperm and ovum are minute.

Within the seed is the potential of the full grown tree, but many things can interfere with the complete unfolding and growth. A harsh climate, poor soil, attack by disease or an exterior force, overcrowding and insufficient light can all be causes of poor growth.

 Are these factors in what holds back your own potential?

Let us take them in turn.

A harsh climate: What was your childhood situation and environment? Napoleon said that as the twig is bent so the tree grows. That is obviously true of human life. We know it only too well now from studies of the childhood and home environment of psychopaths and abusers. Hitler’s past abuse went back many generations.

Even if your childhood was good there may have been particular events that left marks and blockages. Sometimes things that may be thought of as inconsequential are important. A woman I worked with demonstrated to me two such things. In one she remembered herself as a child taking her first steps. She was holding a cup and fell. The cup broke and cut her lip badly. Her mother was upset and scolded her. The resulting impact was that she felt any independent activity toward independence was likely to be painful and end disastrously. Subtle but life shaping.

The second thing was that she became pregnant and did not feel she could raise the child. She did not want to have an abortion so decided to give the child for adoption at birth. When the time came she felt such connection with her baby that its loss was painful. She was given no counselling and returned home and started sobbing to release her pain. Her neighbour came in however and instead of supporting her release, urged her to stop crying. Seventeen years later in her work with me she released that pain. It had been blocking her flow of love and feelings all those years.

What are the events that have led to blocks in you? And what attitudes or lessons have those events led to?