More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Well,” you say, “there have to be some experts who have the answers.” When upset, you go to a doctor or psychiatrist, an analyst, a social worker, or an astrologer. You take up religion, get philosophy, take the Erhard Seminars Training (est), tap yourself with EFT. You get your chakras balanced, try some reflexology, go for ear acupuncture, do iridology, get healed with lights and crystals. You meditate, chant a mantra, drink green tea, try the Pentecostals, breathe in fire, and speak in tongues. You get centered, learn NLP, try actualizations, work on visualizations, study psychology, join
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
You and your friends have tried all of the above, you say? Oh, the human! You wonderful creature! Tragic, comic and yet so noble! Such courage to keep on searching! What drives us to keep looking for an answer? Suffering? Oh, yes. Hope? Certainly. But there is something more than that.
Letting go is like the sudden cessation of an inner pressure or the dropping of a weight. It is accompanied by a sudden feeling of relief and lightness, with an increased happiness and freedom. It is an actual mechanism of the mind, and everyone has experienced it on occasion.
Because we are afraid to face them, they continue to accumulate and, finally, we secretly begin looking forward to death to bring all of the pain to an end.
It is the accumulated pressure of feelings that causes thoughts. One feeling, for instance, can create literally thousands of thoughts over a period of time. Think, for instance, of one painful memory from early life, one terrible regret that has been hidden. Look at all the years and years of thoughts associated with that single event. If we could surrender the underlying painful feeling, all of those thoughts would disappear instantly and we would forget the event.
What is the surrendered state? It means to be free of negative feelings in a given area so that creativity and spontaneity can manifest without opposition or the interference of inner conflicts.
Suppression and repression. These are the most common ways in which we push feelings down and put them aside. In repression, this happens unconsciously; in suppression, it happens consciously.
The pressure of suppressed feelings is later felt as irritability, mood swings, tension in the muscles of the neck and back, headaches, cramps, menstrual disorders, colitis, indigestion, insomnia, hypertension, allergies, and other somatic conditions. When we repress a feeling, it is because there is so much guilt and fear over the feeling that it is not even consciously felt at all.
Denial results in major emotional and maturational blocks. It is usually accompanied by the mechanism of projection. Because of guilt and fear, we repress the impulse or feeling, and we deny its presence within us. Instead of feeling it, we project it onto the world and
“They” then become the enemy, and the mind searches for and finds justification to reinforce the projection. Blame is placed on people, places, institutions, food, climatic conditions, astrological events, social conditions, fate, God, luck, the devil, foreigners, ethnic groups, political rivals, and other things outside of ourselves.
With this mechanism, the feeling is vented, verbalized, or stated in body language, and acted out in endless group demonstrations. The expression of negative feelings allows just enough of the inner pressure to be let out so that the remainder can then be suppressed.
The expression of a feeling, first, tends to propagate that feeling and give it greater energy. Second, the expression of the feeling merely allows the remainder to be suppressed out of awareness.
The more fear we have on the inside, the more our perception of the world is changed to a fearful, guarded expectancy. To the fearful person, this world is a terrifying place. To the angry person, this world is a chaos of frustration and vexation. To the guilty person, it is a world of temptation and sin, which they see everywhere.
The basic rule is that we focus on what we have repressed.
The rationalizing mind prefers to keep the true causes of emotion out of awareness and utilizes the mechanism of projection to do this. It blames events or other people for “causing” a feeling and views itself as the helpless innocent victim of external causes.
If, through constant surrendering, we have let go of the pent-up store of anger, it is very difficult and, in fact, even impossible for anyone or any situation to “make” us angry.
Suppressed love results in the broken heart of the heart attack. Suppressed love re-emerges as excessive adoration of pets and various forms of idolatry. True love is free of fear and characterized by non-attachment.
When the pressure of suppressed and repressed feelings exceeds the individual’s tolerance level, the mind will create an event “out there” upon which to vent and displace itself.
Motion pictures using Kirlian photography, such as those done by Dr. Thelma Moss, show rapid fluctuations of the color and size of the energy field with changes of emotions (Krippner, 1974). The energy field has traditionally been called an “aura” and can be seen by people who have been born with or learned the ability to see vibrations of that frequency. The aura changes color and size with emotions. Muscle-testing also demonstrates the energy changes that accompany emotions, as our body’s muscles instantly respond to positive and negative stimuli. Thus, our basic emotional states transmit
...more
Emotional patterns and their associated thought forms, for instance, can be picked up and received consciously by psychics at a great distance. This can be demonstrated experimentally, and the scientific basis for this has been a subject of great interest in advanced quantum physics.
Letting go involves being aware of a feeling, letting it come up, staying with it, and letting it run its course without wanting to make it different or do anything about it. It means simply to let the feeling be there and to focus on letting out the energy behind it.
Let go of wanting to resist the feeling. It is resistance that keeps the feeling going.
To let feelings come up, it is easier to let go of the reaction to having the feelings in the first place. A fear of fear itself is a prime example of this. Let go of the fear or guilt that you have about the feeling first, and then get into the feeling itself.
When letting go, ignore all thoughts. Focus on the feeling itself, not on the thoughts. Thoughts are endless and self-reinforcing, and they only breed more thoughts.
As we become more familiar with letting go, it will be noticed that all negative feelings are associated with our basic fear related to survival and that all feelings are merely survival programs that the mind believes are necessary.
Often we have let go but think that we haven’t. It will be our friends who make us aware of the change. One reason for this phenomenon is that, when something is fully surrendered, it disappears from consciousness.
That’s a good time to reach down and let go of some things (suppressed and repressed “garbage”) that we wouldn’t want to tackle if we were in the dumps.
Sometimes you will feel stuck with a particular feeling. Simply surrender to the feeling of being stuck. Just let it be there and don’t resist it. If it doesn’t disappear, see if you can let go of the feeling in bits and pieces.
Whichever psychology is studied reveals that the primary human goal, superseding all others, is survival. Every human desire seeks to ensure one’s personal survival and the survival of one’s identified groups, such as family, loved ones, and country.
the loss of the capacity to experience. To that end, people are interested in the survival of the body because they believe that they are the body and, therefore, they need the body to experience their existence.
It is common for humans to look outside of themselves for the satisfaction of their needs. This leads them to experience themselves as vulnerable because they are insufficient unto themselves.
When used by the intellect, the basic underlying emotion is usually unconscious or at least out of awareness. When the underlying emotion is forgotten or ignored and not experienced, people are unaware of the reason for their actions and they develop all kinds of plausible reasons. In fact, they frequently do not know why they are doing what they are doing.
There is a simple way to become conscious of the underlying emotional goal behind any activity through use of the question, “What for?” With each answer, “What for?” is asked again and again until the basic feeling is uncovered.
Every activity or desire will reveal that the basic goal is to achieve a certain feeling. There are no other goals than to overcome fear and achieve happiness. Emotions are connected with what we believe will ensure our survival, not with what actually will. Emotions themselves are actually the cause of the basic fear that drives everyone to seek security constantly.
Each level of consciousness (or attractor pattern) is calibrated on a logarithmic scale of energetic power, ranging from 1–1000. The level of Full Enlightenment (1000), at the top of the Map, represents the highest level attainable in the human realm; it is the energy of Jesus Christ, the Buddha, and Krishna. The level of Shame (20) is at the bottom, close to death, representing bare survival.
The levels of consciousness below Courage are destructive, whereas the levels above it are life-supportive.
Above the level of Courage, people seek us out because we give energy to them (“power”) and we have goodwill towards them. Below the level of Courage, people avoid us because we take energy from them (“force”) and we want to use them for our own material or emotional needs.
we can say that the lower end of the scale is associated with lower vibrational frequencies: lower energy, lower power, poorer life circumstances, poorer relationships, less abundance, less love, and poorer physical and emotional health. Because of the low energy, such needy people drain us on all levels. They tend to be avoided and find themselves surrounded by people on the same level
The fastest way to move from the bottom to the top is by telling the truth to ourselves and to others.
They are filed according to feeling tone, not fact. Consequently, there is a scientific basis for the observation that self-awareness is increased much more rapidly by observing feelings rather than thoughts.
The feeling can then be worked with by first accepting that it is there, without resisting it or condemning it. And then one begins to empty out the energy of the feeling directly by letting it be what it is until it runs out.
As soon as he felt at peace, he instantly remembered where the passport was. In fact, it was in a place so simple and obvious that only unconscious blocking could explain why he had not remembered it. Needless to say, all of the thousands of thoughts about the missing passport, the failed trip and the potential consequences instantly disappeared.
The purpose of this maneuver is to reduce the sheer overwhelming quantity of the emotion itself so that it can be disassembled and let go of in bits and pieces (this process is described below). Thus, in this case, it is all right consciously to push away as much of the emotion as we are capable of at the moment. The emotion can be reduced in intensity by sharing the feeling with close friends or mentors. By merely expressing the feeling, some of the energy behind it is reduced.
What he can look at, then, are some of the small trivia about the job. For instance, could he let go of wanting to have lunch where he always had lunch with his business colleagues? Could he let go of wanting to park his car in the parking space he always had in the past?
The purpose of surrendering these smaller aspects of losing a job, which may seem trivial, is that it gets the mind into the letting go mode.
It is as though all emotions have the same underlying energy, so that to surrender in one direction surrenders feelings which appear, on the surface, to be in an opposite direction. This is a matter of clinical experience; it must be tried personally in order to believe it.
Handling a crisis from the emotional rather than the intellectual level will shorten its duration dramatically.
Paradoxically, after a life crisis, there often is a period of variable duration of peace and calmness, sometimes approaching the level of mystical experience. The “dark night of the soul” frequently precedes states of heightened awareness.
Fear of life is really the fear of emotions. It is not the facts that we fear but our feelings about them. Once we have mastery over our feelings, our fear of life diminishes.
The price of holding on to smallness can be demonstrated with muscle testing. The procedure is fairly simple (Hawkins, [1995], 2012). Hold in mind a mean, petty thought and have someone press down on your arm while you resist; notice the effect. Now choose the exact opposite view. Picture yourself as being generous, forgiving, loving, and experiencing your inner greatness. Instantly, there will be an enormous increase in muscle strength indicating a surge of positive bio-energy. Smallness brings weakness, sickness, disease, and death.
