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 “I would like to beg you dear Sir,
as well as I can, to have patience with everything
unresolved in
your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if
they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign
language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be
given to you now, because you would not be able to live
them. And the point is to live everything. Live the
questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you
will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into
the answer.”
A note to the readers:
The Evolutionary Pointers that make up this work are
summarized at the end of each chapter. Those summaries then
compose the entirety of the last chapter. A significant
portion of your success rests with your ability to fully
integrate these signposts of awakening into your
life. The chapters also contain “Real life examples,”
based on factual situations that demonstrate the practical
application of this work. As you appreciate and complete the
various assessments and exercises, a period of introspection
may be required to assimilate the potential you recognize.
Confidence, reliance, and trust in your deepest essence will
blossom in direct proportion to your engagement with this
work. Freedom, you will witness, is a choice.
awakening to power and
grace: Power and Grace moves
happiness from the realm of the mystic to the living room.
Its format is full of light and life. Power and Grace is
uncomplicated, unbound by religiosity, direct when
necessary, humorous at times, and most of all, effective for
modern-day living.
The goal of this book is to conclusively dispel
any possibility that the ego is commanding your quest to
awaken. The single greatest misconception held by modern
spiritual seekers is that while most are convinced they are making
progress on the path,
they have yet to access it. It is not my wish to deter
valiant efforts towards sacredness, however, to ensure your
triumphant success you must be sure that the ego has not
concealed itself in your everyday life situations.
Because the ego offers us a very
convincing picture of “the
way,” we seldom question if our
path can lead us to victory. To awaken, it is
critical to uncover whether or not the ego is manipulating
and directing your quest for freedom. This book reveals a
process of awakened engagement with life that significantly
shortens the quest for liberation. This leads to spontaneous
right-action and the simultaneous silencing of the
unreasonable voice of the ego. It is only by identifying and
awakening to ego that your existing skills can be directed
towards greatest for the sake of humanity.
Awakening
reveals if your attention (your consciousness) is being held
hostage by conditioning, and exactly where the ego has
hidden itself away in the midst of everyday activity. Most
of us have no idea just how pervasive the ego’s influence
is in our lives. Awakening to ego removes its control over
your life. Exploring that, which rests beyond accumulated
agreements, inherited limitations, and unconscious patterns,
reveals your full potential and your eternal motive.
When
unconscious or hidden ego motives are driving our decisions,
we commonly manifest fleeting states of purpose, ease of
being, contentment, and fulfillment interspersed with
periods of indecisiveness, doubt, mistrust, confusion, and
restrictive fear. Conspicuous lack of your eternal motive
implies a subtle denial of your full potential because of
concealed conditioning. Without further ado, here are four
statements for you to consider:
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1) I relate as the same person, and as
my full potential, in all my relevant
relationships*
—intimate, personal, and business.
2)
I
do not create any unnecessary suffering for
myself or others.
3)
There is evidence for a selfless motive in all
of
my relevant
relationships.
4)
All my relevant relationships are completely free
from conflict.
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yes
no
____ ____
____ ____
____ ____
____ ____
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*Relevant relationships are those in
which you spend more than eight hours per year in conscious
relatedness.
A “yes” response to each statement indicates
that the path your tread is unfettered from the
chains of conditioning. A “no” response to one or more
of these statements implies you may be unknowingly wandering
with the ego towards
the start of
the spiritual path thereby sidestepping your own
eternal motive.
Here is a little story about potential:
A small eagle was raised with chickens so naturally assumed she was also
a chicken. Her life in the coop was very busy, and with all
the hatching and clucking to do, she ignored the rumors that
she was actually an eagle.
One day, a great Bald Eagle landed on the fence near
her coop. He stood fearsome, tall and proud, yet the little
one, who always seemed to have more “chutzpah” than most chickens, ventured to the fence, despite
some trepidation.
“Tell me what it is to fly,” she said.
The big eagle explained to her in great detail what it is to
fly.
So the little one hopped up on a crate outside the coop and
jumped.
“I'm flying!” she said with great glee as she flapped
her wings awkwardly. Then she quickly returned to the
eagle and said,
"That was good, but not quite
what I expected, please tell me again.”
So the ever-patient eagle once again told the chick about
flying. This time, jumping from the roof of the coop, she
exclaimed,
"I'm
really flying!”
She returned to the hen house, content that she knew what it
was to fly.
But, later, seeing the eagle soar gracefully into the sky
and
then return to
the fence, she went up to him and said,
“I know you told me twice before, but tell me again...
what is it really like to fly?”
The eagle looked at her and said,
“How can I tell you how the wind feels as it flows through the
tips of my feathers? How can I tell you what it means to
sense left and dive, and in that same instant turn left and
dive? How can I tell you what it is to soar high above the
earth, or glide through the evening sky feeling the first
drops of rain pattering onto my back?
If you really want to know what flying is, go over there and JUMP,” as
he gestured to a ledge high up a mountain far beyond the
chicken yard.
The little one was considering this when suddenly the chicken ego in her
said…
“What will the girls think? Why not go back to the coop,
where it is safe and warm? Leave this eagle to his fanciful
flight. You are
not an
eagle; you are a chicken!”
What do you think she did?
Which voices do you
habitually pay attention to? Is there more than just one
voice? Who’s listening? Do you know you have a choice
about how you respond to the suggestions you hear? Are you
sure that your decisions can permanently free you from the
coop of needless suffering? Do you know how to recognize
those awakened choices? Do we really prefer clarity
over confusion, ease of being over conflict? Who made that
choice?
Awakening reveals that you were born an eagle,
yet have stayed mostly in the “box”. Your awakening
unfolds when you consistently recognize your awakened
choices. Awakened choices shift the levels of
your consciousness and propel you onto the path of power and
grace. Awakened choices allow trust, surrender, and
acceptance to flow into your life—just as it is—no
matter what kind of an ungodly mess it happens to be.
“Consciousness” is simply the ability to be
aware. The capacity to expand or develop your consciousness
is inherent in every human. The development of your
awareness by choice always has an affirmative and cumulative
effect on your ability to experience happiness and ease of
being, regardless of your history. Because awareness can be
increased by choice, some people are more
conscious than others. A humble candle-maker may not yet be
able to move his awareness past three or four villages. An
awakened person trained in meditation can enter and transmit
the nirvana at will.
Consciousness is the untouchable awareness of being
which took form some fourteen billion years ago, when
something came from nothing. Since even that much time is
not enough for us to evolve naturally, humans eventually
“appeared”. Then along came you and I. As the human mind
developed, conditioning also evolved and the ego emerged to
fabricate a rigid reality of thoughts, emotions, beliefs,
superstitions, heavens, hells, gods and goblins.
Our inherited attachment to these impressions—and the
conditioning that holds them in place—not only creates
needless suffering, but also perpetuates the continual
convolution of the ego. It is this conditioning and the very
same ego that eventually launches our search for
enlightenment. Why did the Buddha find peace? He was sure he
was on the path. How did he know this? He abandoned the
conditioned life first, then he identified the ego,
then appeared the light! Gloriously expressing your full
potential is not a matter of more knowledge but of
objectivity on what you already know.
Many of us dedicate our lives to building the
strengths of character that bring success and fulfillment.
The fortunate constantly seek to be better and more evolved
individuals. We are wandering sadhus
in ochre ‘Hummers’! As a result of this relentless
thirst for purpose, the self-development industry
flourishes. Yet despite a mind-boggling selection of
personal improvement schemes and feel-better programs,
something is amiss: evidence of everyday delight. The
fundamental issues we struggle with persist; the crowd just
gets older; and those who were not born when you got started
on your quest now fill the front rows of the lecture halls
in wide-eyed anticipation of finding a better way.
The vast majority of self-help programs are ego-based,
therefore fundamentally objective-less. Though these
programs often help change careers, addresses, and roosters
at the end of the day—or after a thirty-year quest for
inner peace—you may wonder if the only changes that were
obvious the cosmetic ones. Deep-seated questions often
remain unanswered and angst and disharmony in our
relationships prevail. So why, after billions of dollars
spent to awaken, have we not yet done so? The simple answer
is: We don’t realize how the ogre is manipulating our
decisions, words, actions, and relationships. We
inadvertently allow it free rein over our lives.
We keep following the signs that say:
learn to fly with chicken flight school
certified instructors
this way
->
To get us started on uncovering the hidden determinants of
our actions we have to briefly mention
Freud. In his first book in 1923, “The Ego and the
Id,” he equated the ego with a sense of self.
He later revised this idea and described the ego as a set of
psychic functions related to the gathering and processing of
information, defense and intellectual functioning, and
memory. Therefore
a healthy ego (the self-organizing principle of the psyche)
is necessary us to survive and thrive. The ego in different
individuals can be at a different level of development, but
the maturity of this Freudian mechanism does not necessarily
imply that it is “personal”.
For example: In order to pay for his children’s education,
a jeweler in New Zealand will rely upon a wide range of ego
functions to determine if the effects of increasing his
working hours will have a detrimental effect on his
relationship with his family. You may employ similar
functions to understand the consequences of taking an aging
parent into your home. How each of us processes, manages,
and subsequently responds to life becomes an expression of
the level of development of the ego in us. But note that our
individual responses do not necessarily make the
self-organizing principle “personal”.
In this book, we will distinguish between this
psychotherapeutic ego
and “the ego” we wish to reveal as we awaken. From
this point forward I will refer to the part of each one of
us that we seek to identify in our spiritual work as: the ogre.
This modern ogre is a psycho-matrix. The ogre
of legend is a monster that eats humans. (Root: Orcus,
the god of the underworld.)
The ogre is the aspect of humanity that is
obsessed with self-interested ideas and activities. And it
has us caught up in the loop. Ogre-based self-absorption
begins early in childhood. It then becomes personalized by
the naïve acceptance of inaccurate, albeit well-intended
opinions, about the sources of fulfillment.
Conditioning tells us to “buy a nice coop (coupé if you
prefer), lay eggs, don’t ruffle too many feathers, and
whatever you do, don’t listen to the eagles.” The ogre eventually perceives itself as a separate and superior
entity and assumes exclusive rights to our thoughts and
actions. Fortunately
there is only one ogre. It is not your ogre, my ogre,
his ogre, or her ogre;
it
is the ogre. Forget the oracle, the one you seek is the
ogre.
“You
could spend your whole life going from one spiritual
workshop, diet or fitness program to another without ever
realizing that the whole enterprise is based not so much on
self-improvement as on self-loathing. The guru culture of
self-loathing will persist until the wisdom of the ages is
passed to the reader not only with the promise of light and
love, but with the tools and the evolutionary call to awaken
to selfless responsibility and dignity.”
Power
and Grace provides you with
one set of tools to respond to the evolutionary call inherent in
living and dying, in flying and crashing, and in getting up
again. It reveals that what is commonly referred to as “my
spiritual quest” is a kaleidoscope of distraction, fully
orchestrated by the ogre to keep you clear of the real path.
This, as you can imagine, is very good for the ogre, but not
so for you. Only when your spiritual inquiry is
genuine will your awakening emerge and stabilize as an
everyday experience.
Unfortunately the emergence of “the spiritual
quest” gets lost in the frantic pace of modern life since
the “rat race” excludes the pursuit of such a luxury.
The ogre has carefully fabricated a world of things-to-do
that consume our consciousness from the cradle to the grave.
Why? The ogre is simply unable to stare its own demise in
the eye. You are, however,
and when you do, the ogre is disavowed as your guide and you
begin to live.
This revelation is the evolutionary call that leads you to
your eternal motive: to harness your God-given ability to
supersede distractions and become fully conscious of your
own potential. When you transcend habitual diversions,
including your beliefs about life without the ogre, you can
embrace the perfection of the
human experience as an awakened person.
To let go of the ogre, you need only to identify it. Seeing it move in you (but not
partaking in that movement) sets you free of suffering.
Awakening is about releasing the careless whispers of the
personalized ogre. This is why liberation, or awakening to
authentic joy, is often referred to as ogre-death. It
is not that the ogre dies;
you just don’t pay attention to its endless hankerings
anymore. Then, as your awareness evolves, your actions
become the means by which power and grace manifest in this world.
It is worthwhile to note that the de-centering
of the ogre is frequently accompanied by intense emotional
and psychological pressure. Often, both internal and
external opposition combine in a bid to thwart your
authentic nature. Be careful not to underestimate this force; though transitory, it can completely derail even the most
inspired endeavors. Jesus said: “Let he who seeks
remain always seeking until he finds, and when he finds he
will be troubled, having been troubled, he will marvel, and
will reign over all.”
Awakening to Power and Grace - Evolutionary Pointers:
power
and grace: Power
and grace are options available to us all. Power and grace
emerge as the expression of potential in an awakened life
for the sake of humanity.
awakening
to wisdom: Wisdom
emerges from paying attention to the results we get. Paying attention means noting the
outcome of past actions and adjusting our intention for
future actions accordingly.
the
creation of the conditions for joy is your choice: Power and grace are
not dependent upon belief, but your wholehearted engagement
with the dynamic process of living beyond the ogre.
the
declaration of freedom: At some point we have to admit, “I am
Buddha.” If it is not that simple, how complicated would
you like it?
determining
your interest:
By making the pursuit of awakening even marginally
more important than anything else you do, you
guarantee that goal. Otherwise, reincarnation is the
ogre’s salvation.
hope
and surrender: Without
attentive action, hope and unhappiness are
synonymous. Surrender combined with attentive
action compels freedom, regardless of the situations
in which you have to act.
spiritual
pretenders: We unknowingly maintain distinctions that prevent the
unification of our real
lives with our spiritual
lives. To the ogre, it is more important, to look
like a spiritual person than to allow you to create the
conditions for the spiritual life.
(End of excerpt from Introduction)
©
Power and Grace ~ The Wisdom of Awakening: 2006
©
Power and Grace ~ The Wisdom of Awakening: 2006
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