Before we share any specifics about world events, we want to share some perspectives we believe are key to our healing as a planet. The focus of this first article will be to clarify some of the primary issues we all share at this stage of our growth and development.
By learning to look at the world from the perspectives of common humanity, we will ultimately grow into a much deeper understanding of ourselves. This is vital, for the true point of power always starts with the SELF.
The only way we will truly heal and transform the limitations of our world is to connect to the source of power within the individual. That will come as we learn to look with courage at ourselves with deeper honesty and deeper compassion. That courage needs to start with ME and YOU.
(To be able to share a great deal of information with as much clarity as possible, I will separate main ideas into small sections.
Each section will begin in BLUE. Important key points within those sections will be emphasized in WHITE.)
We live in a world that is unfulfilled in many ways
We are entering this new millennium as a world with major symptoms of the limitation, fear and defense that accompany unfulfillment. Why is that? We are a world of people who do not know how to fulfill our own deepest needs as empowered individuals. The good news is that more than ever, we are also a world that is searching for something more.
Why do we not know how to fulfill our deepest needs?
What we first need to consider is that we are all creatures of learned behavior. We begin as primitive, little ones who first learn and grow by imitating what we are taught or that which is modeled for us. Within that process, our choices can only become as sophisticated as the depth of the teaching we receive.
The order of our development as children is common to each one of us, for it happens according to specific stages and specific needs. Our first focus when we are born is on the issues of the first chakra - issues and choices of safety, security and survival.
This means that in order for each one of us to move into higher, more evolved choices, we must first build a foundation of feeling safe within the family. This provides the foundation to continue developing our emerging sense of Self. Without that clear foundation, we have nothing to stand on to build a growing sense of trust and self-empowerment.
This growth into a sense of Self continues to take place as we are nurtured through a series of stages and ever emerging needs. The stages include moving up from chakra to chakra (one set of primary energy issues and foundational levels after another). These levels eventually encompass the development of the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual aspects of our lives (in that order).
Let's look at a healthy model of this process to gain more clarity.
In the healthy model, it is first up to our parents to meet our primitive needs. As infants and toddlers we are unable to respond or do things for ourselves. However, as we begin to grow and trust that we are safe and nurtured in the world, our parents eventually begin to teach us how to identify our OWN needs.
We first learn how to make primitive choices for ourselves. While continuing to be guided along the way, we then move into deeper and deeper stages of this choosing process - learning to take responsibility for ourselves. This is how we individuate into a sense of true personal power!
By the time we reach adulthood, this process of nurturing support and guidance has taught us that meeting our own needs is our divine opportunity and right.
This healthy and natural unfolding also teaches us to embrace life one step at a time as a PROCESS. As we do, we are able to watch the miracle of each unique individual emerging step-by-step with an awareness of their own value.
A final benefit of this healthy model is the fact that by growing into the ability to meet our own physical needs, express and respond to all of our authentic feelings, using our will and intelligence to make clear choices and fulfill our dreams and visions as individuals, we naturally create a world of empowered, valued individuals who are fulfilled from within.
Once an individual trusts that personal fulfillment is possible and natural, they also understand the benefit of supporting others in their process of growth. This creates a world of individuals focused on "US consciousness."
Why have we not evolved into a world of such advanced choices and fulfilled individuals?
First we need to understand that the world is a reflection of our own personal process of growth. Our planet and all the people also evolve as a mass consciousness by moving through stages of a process. In other words, mass consciousness grows much like moving from first grade to second and so on.
Each of those stages on our planet usually lasts about two thousand years. We have been in one of those stages for the last two thousand years. This transition is even delineated by BC and AD. For this particular cycle we have been learning through ideals and the limitations of duality. Both of these issues have made quite clear what the holes are in our foundations.
It only takes backing up one generation to your own parents to see how many of your own limiting patterns and choices have been perpetuated. It boils down to the fact that your parents basically passed on the limitations inherent in what they were taught. Since all of their needs were not met or fulfilled, they did not know how to meet yours fully. This limiting stage of our development as a planet has not allowed us to build a complete sense or trust of ourselves as individuals with individual choices.
We have been a world passing on fearful, conflicting choices for generation after generation. This has resulted in a world that has not built a solid foundation. We have, therefore, not felt safe enough to move on to more evolved choices. Primarily apparent are missing pieces of our nurturing, emotional and spiritual needs. (We have compensated with an over-development and dependence on our mental bodies and our wills.)
These deficiencies have left us with many holes inside, seemingly stuck in certain stages of survival consciousness.
Why would we continue passing on these choices? The answer is simple. People in survival are afraid of change. With holes in our foundations, we left in a survival approach to life. With that fear, challenging the family/world system has not seemed like a safe choice.
Imagine it this way.
When a child shows up to first grade, it is all new and a bit scary. However, they soon discover there is a big person sitting behind the desk - the powerful teacher. So the child naturally looks to the teacher to feel safe. Imagine that the teacher says nothing of any impact. Nothing of importance is shared or taught, except a list of rules - rights and wrongs.
Do you think the child is going to know how to gather healthy information on her own?
Do you think the child will feel safe and nurtured with the first-grade needs that show up from within her sacred little self? Do you think the child will actually know when it is time to move on to second grade? Do you think the child will embrace the idea that school/life is a safe and nurturing place to grow and reveal her deepest self?
Then for the sake of clarity, let's imagine within the list of rules of right and wrong that the teacher is not comfortable with her own feelings or creative individual expression. She will naturally suppress those parts of the child in the name of feeling safe. She may very well do this thinking it is best for the child - since it is what gives her the illusion of comfort.
Within this model, through imitation and habit, the child will most likely show up to her first grade desk day after day, year after year.
She will continue to get bigger, but without nurturing education her nervous system will not know how to move on or grow emotionally. Since the "powerful teacher" is the closest thing she has to feeling safe at school, chances are she will not risk creating conflict, rejection or punishment with the one in authority. She will find herself eventually in an adult body, still sitting energetically in her first grade desk.
Required next step: Finding the courage to look to the truth...
In order to find clear solutions to these challenges, we need to look to what created the specifics of our initial fear. We have already said that building this foundation of self required that we feel safe in the world, which boils down to feeling safe within the family.
This sense of safety is typically attempted by trying to fit in. This means imitating what our parents taught us was acceptable. This set of limits is what we call their comfort zones. These limits have most been often defined by their perspectives of right and wrong (duality), enforced through reward and punishment.
Most of us were taught that whatever we did or expressed that agreed with our parents' comfort zones was "right."
Anything that triggered feelings and memories connected with their past pain took them out of their comfort zones. This was not safe to their wounded nervous systems and was considered "wrong" or unacceptable. Anytime we were good (in the comfort zone), we were rewarded. Anytime we were in conflict, we were corrected, encouraged to change or even punished until we learned the "right way."
These limitations of reward and punishment were then expanded into a system of eternal reward and punishment from individuals in our religious systems - based on the same survival approach of pain and fear motivation. If we were good, we would go to Heaven. And if not...!
It is important to remember that these perspectives of right and wrong were established when we were very little people. Since we were completely dependent upon others for our very survival, these perspectives were anchored deeply in our nervous system. A child can only feel safe when accepted in the family, so challenging these early comfort zones would only bring them face to face with a fear of pain, punishment and rejection.
To the child incapable of meeting their own needs, true rejection was equal to death. It is important to realize this was the depth of our early associations.
Within all of that, it is no wonder we never learned to trust the process of growing into our individuality through a trust of the process of trial and error. Just like our parents before us, we have remained afraid at the core to consider real change. It has just seemed too risky to the child within.
There are four primary effects of this system that we need to be able to identify in order to move forward.
First, we all had emerging needs that came up at various stages. For instance, at 18-24 months we had the emerging need to have encouragement and a safe environment in which to feel all of our own feelings (the first stage of our emotional body development).
When these needs were unidentified and unmet, we did not feel safe on deeper levels. We then began to compensate by developing layers of defense and separation. This involved literally surrounding ourselves with layers of energetic armoring.
A second major compensation involved developing a MASK of whom we thought we needed to be to please Mom and Dad. Fulfilling that reality required us to disconnect from vital parts of our authentic selves that we perceived were unacceptable. This left us with a deep sense of feeling unsafe and alone on the inside.
Third, we need to understand that since Mom and Dad did not know how to teach us to connect to OURSELVES to fulfill our needs, we have remained dependent upon them energetically - even into adulthood! This simply means that we never truly individuated.
This leads us to the fact that even as adults, we are like wounded children on the inside!
We were taught that someone OUTSIDE of ourselves would define our limits and comfort zones. We were taught to focus OUTSIDE ourselves to gain acceptance. We were taught to look OUTSIDE ourselves for a sense of validation or approval. This came from the fact that in those primary stages of our development, someone outside of us was in charge of fulfilling our needs and ensuring our survival.
The result of being stuck or frozen in this early stage of our growth leaves our nervous system with the impression that the source of our safety and fulfillment is OUTSIDE. So in many ways we have remained like children, waiting for someone outside ourselves to give us permission to move forward.
This may make no sense to your adult logic. This is because we have continued to grow and learn, having moved out of the house and perhaps even created other families.
However, we need to begin to realize that our nervous system is like a computer. What we put into that hard drive is what comes up on the screen of our lives. If we have only input a first-grade emotional education, that is all we can call up from within. When the computer is imprinted with limitation and fear, it also doesn't magically delete these foundational experiences just because our logic grows.
Learning to trust ourselves within the process of growth can only come when we learn to fill in the holes of our inner foundations.
We need to realize that in many ways we have grown up and gone through the motions, but that we do now yet know how to fulfill ourselves. We are back to where this article started - We are a world that is unfulfilled in many ways! Outside, we may act behind the mask that we believe is required to keep the peace or avoid conflict. But inside we are screaming silently, "HEY, WHAT ABOUT ME?!?
This leads us to the problem directly: "Me Consciousness" in unfulfillment.
The only thing we have known to do while looking OUTSIDE to compensate for the holes within is to become a world of junkies. In trying to replace our unmet needs, we have become "junkies of gratification."
In our childish myths, we have hoped that a bigger house, a nicer car or any number of other things would give us a sense of self. We have hoped that achieving a certain level of status would give us a sense of safety and value. We have searched and practically raped our planet into her own survival threat in the name of filling in the void.
This is a rather bleak picture of the limitations we have been exploring and attempting to move through for the last two thousand years. We have been in a stage of exploring duality, the conflict and limitation created from a system of right and wrong, reward and punishment.
The wonderful news is that our planet has reached the time for an evolutionary step into the next stage of our evolution and learning.
We have reached the end of one 2000 year cycle and are now moving into another. We have a great deal to look forward to as we now learn to access the tremendous well of our untapped potential that becomes possible as our consciousness awakes. But it is important to realize it will not happen magically. It is up to us to begin looking to the truth of our limitations and finally consider challenging the system we have known - to consider healing change!
It is likely that you have become aware in recent years that we are in a time of accelerated change. We can see it happening all around us. But most have not realized that this is a literal shift of evolution, attempting to raise mass consciousness.
The truth is that things are beginning to shift on the inside of our lives, just as much as we can see them shifting on the outside. The challenge is that we have learned to focus outside, while suppressing and avoiding much that is going on inside. However, if we are willing to learn how to look to our own lives with courage, we will see that we are being energetically encouraged to wake up to our authentic needs once again in new and powerful ways!
This requires that we wake up and respond to the wounded child within. We can already see this happening in the fact that more people are searching for deeper answers than ever before. People have been waking up to the fact that our old choices are clearly unfulfilling. People have been admitting "the Emperor is wearing no clothes." And people have been searching for something more.
As a planet, we are beginning to move into the next phase of our learning and development. As we move into this new millennium, we have reached a time when the SOUL is rising from deep within to guide us into the next layers of fulfillment and self-empowerment. From the model above, the soul is like the wise teacher we have been waiting for, who will guide us beyond right and wrong and a survival relationship with life. This is the time when we can powerfully reclaim the sacred individuality we left behind so long ago.
We need to realize that it is never too late to grow into our emerging needs, fulfilling ourselves one step at a time.
What do we do now?
Waking up is a process of inner enlightenment, shedding light on that which has long been held in the dark within. This process of enlightenment is very closely tied to the process of dis-illusionment.
1. If we are going to grow in the exponential potential of this time of change, we must first begin to recognize the habitual limits of our comfort zones. In other words, we must be willing to face the child's illusion that the world is based on our family's system of right and wrong, reward and punishment. We need to realize this is merely a perspective of fear and control that will now allow us to grow and fulfill ourselves with individual choices.
The adult reality we need to face is that our old choices have merely built a fortress around our wounded inner selves - the self that was buried in unmet needs.
We have now reached the time to move up and out of the survival programming of our lives. We are ready for a planetary move into the energy of our hearts for the first time in our recorded history.
As we begin to pay attention we will see that there are already inner symptoms of change taking place as things are heating up in the kitchen.
2. We need to respond to the feelings that are rising which challenge the inner child's comfort zones or myths. Though most of us were not taught to pay attention to a great deal of that which is happening within - for years now the wounded feelings we have always been able to hold down in the name of survival for so long are beginning to rise from deep within.
True to form, many people have been unwilling to change or respond to these rising feelings. Just look to the huge amounts of people that have become drug dependent in an attempt to move away from the pain.
Whether people are on "anti-depressants" or alcohol or some other form of addicted gratification to distract and numb out, as a whole we have been unprepared to respond and feel.
We simply need healthy information and nurturing support from one another as we learn to move out of our frozen comfort zones into an awareness that we are no longer children dependent upon "big people" for our survival or fulfillment. As adults we have the ability to respond, to choose to feel and reconnect to our true depths with no threat at all.
3. As we look within, we need to take a quick inventory.
Ask yourself: "Am I fulfilled? Am I at peace with the depth and intimacy of my life? Am I clear that I am an empowered creator of my own life?"
Or "Am I ruled by what is familiar, afraid that change will only take me out of my comfort zone? Am I afraid that if I change, I will risk punishment for being wrong? Am I afraid of a God who demands a very similar list of rights and wrongs to that which my parents taught me?"
This will give you a great place to start looking at your life with honesty and compassion.
4. Finally as we move forward, we need to make some clear choices about what serves us and what does not serve us any longer.
We can either continue on in limited choices of looking outside in gratification or we can finally take the path of inner fulfillment with clear and healthy tools - and learn how to do what is most natural! The child inside will always prefer immediate gratification - such as a child that will always prefer to eat 10 cookies before dinner. However, it is up to us to finally show up as the adult in our own lives and offer some more fulfilling options - and be willing to follow up with ourselves to develop the discipline to integrate new choices and a new reality.
The energies of natural evolution will continue to increase in the coming months and years - making it more apparent than ever that our survival choices have been empty and unfulfilling.
The powerful energies that have begun to move will continue to encourage and even force change in our world. We can either learn to ride the exciting new wave of change or we will have to fight and defend in an attempt to stay in the comfort zone.
We can see the individuals and groups in our world who are going into a deeper fight in this time of change, such as the increased conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This will do nothing but remind us that fighting for a ME that is unfulfilled will never work.
As long as we continue to look out only for protecting our own comfort zones, we will find others who reflect that choice. We will remain in a ME consciousness, fighting for our limited version of right and wrong. Others will do the same. However, if we begin to realize that we are all the same, making up a world of scared and unfulfilled individuals who are trying to force on the world their limited ideas of right and wrong we will begin to heal and grow into US consciousness.
We need to see that what we have been doing is trying to change, control or punish others to agree with our comfort zones of right and wrong. As children being true to what we were taught, we have tried to change "THEM" so we can feel safe. We have become the limited parents who don't know how to look within to reclaim our true needs as individuals. Only when we learn how to value and respond to our own individuality will we be able to come together as a world in US consciousness.
Survival consciousness believes it must have an enemy.
This is a time when our consciousness is awakening so that we can grow beyond an outer focus, trying to gratify ME at the expense of a more fulfilling vision. It is time to find out that we are quite well-equipped to respond to life as empowered, compassionate adults - one step at a time.
It is time to grow up and look within, so that we can learn to trust and fulfill. We can then get on with creating a world where we reach out and encourage one another.
Looking towards the privilege of "US consciousness" allows us to realize that at the core we are all the same. We all have the same basic needs. And we all have a deep desire to love - for that is what is most natural.
US consciousness. One for All and All for One - the One who knows him/herself and the One who celebrates him/herself and the One who fulfills him/herself!
So be it.
This is the first of many articles which are to follow. We hope that you will share these ideas with those you love. Reach out and encourage people to consider these things, for inner and outer change has only begun to accelerate and transform the world as we have known it to be. And it is up to each one of us and our daily choices that will create a "new world of US consciousness" one step and stage at a time.
The next article will explore the POWER OF THE INDIVIDUAL, for so many people have lived in this childish notion that we do not have a true impact or really matter in the grand scope of things. But we have been so wrong!
So stay tuned and find out how you can begin to take grounded steps into empowerment, into creating a healing world...
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