Hate, Love, and Un-Hate: The Common Cold and Enlightenment

If you ever want to experience awakening, you will, sooner or later, need to address the issue of hate and love. I don’t want to get too philosophical here, so let’s give a simple example. Since I’m experiencing a head cold right now, let’s take a careful look at a common aliment and see what it can offer us.

Your nose is all stuffed up. You have a scratchy throat and you feel just terrible. It appears natural to not like (hate or resist) these symptoms. But when we hate anything we are also doing our best to maintain separation and thus we sustain the illusion of the separate self.

Now we could pretend to love the painful feelings of the body, but anytime we insist on living an untruth we are, again, sustaining the illusion of the separate self, because we are asserting something as true, when, on another level, we know to be false. We are just fooling ourselves and working to be spiritual.

There is a response, however, that conforms with the awakened self. This is not a technique. All clever strategies must fail because they are just tricks. Rather we need to discover what is true and painful conditions present us with an outstanding opportunity to understand what the ego dominated self experiences as an obstacle. Because the truth shows that there is no separation in the universe, we correct the positions of love or hate by simply “un” hating the symptoms. When we “un” hate, our relationship with the painful feelings of the body conform to the awakened state. In other words, we are living the truth of the sensation. Resistance sustains separation. Unhating heals separation.

The awakened self is the realization that the light of awareness is instantly revealed in the ‘manifestation’ of every object and sensation and thought in the universe. There is absolutely no separate self that can be found. The universe is awareness and we are that awareness. This is why when we posit hate or love to anything that happens in our life we are asserting a subject – object duality. The illusory self, which can be motivated by an endless range of reasons and stories divides the universe into the three categories of good, bad, and indifferent depending on how they appear to accord one one’s personal agenda.

But when we “un” hate everything that arises as painful, we realize that everything is just right as it is, even if it manifests as pain. It is not natural to enjoy suffering, but suffering is an inevitable aspect of consciousness and will, sooner or later, inform awareness with its existence. The more we resist it through hate and non-acceptance, the longer we will sustain the illusion of the separate self. If we try to love pain, then we are asserting a positive judgment on to top of a negative judgement. This is just phony spiritualism.

We cannot escape pain, but we can ‘use’ pain to open ourselves to the possibility of awakening. We remove a powerful obstacle when we realize the secret of unhating something. Unhating can be realized in any situation with which the illusory self would prefer to resist or play games with (love what is unlovable).

Ultimately, what we truly resist is our own selves. We seek to disown ourselves from ourselves!

We can apply exactly the same approach to the energy cluster that we sense, in awareness, as our own selves. We “un” hate that as well. We can become friends with ourselves. Did not the Buddha say that the self is suffering? It is suffering as long as we resist this self. Thus the key to happiness is to “un” hate our sense of ourselves as an aspect within the field of awareness. We will discover, as we “un” hate what we resist, that this is the path of enduring peace and contentment.

The power of unhating is very great. It is a doorway to the Authentic Self.

Aggression and Its Healing

A Key Post

People believe that they need to get somewhere, to become something. Realization means to allow what has been hidden to come to light. As long as our anger is hidden, as long as our fear is hidden, we will be driven to be positive and falsely loving. The only issue is the light, the light of clarity, of truth, of seeing.

My friends please believe when I say that you will rely on some expression of force to “get” what you believe you need until the day when you’re just plain exhausted by the constant need to “get”. On that day, when all the interest in force finally dissipates, if from nothing else than lack of interest, you will discover your Authentic Being.

Please notice how we use force to fill the vacuum caused by our inner sense of insufficiency. We need to get it, we need to be loved, we need to correct others of their ignorance, we need to show that we’re in control …

We need to show the world how good we are – We need to show that are better because we love more – we care more.

We attack things because we are motivated by the need “to get” – to get even knowledge for the promise of knowledge is control. How I fell for this one!!! I plunged into every problem I could my mental hands on. I need to understand things – to get them, because in “getting them” I could be free of their weight on my false, fear-based self. This has been the journey that I needed to take in order to see the false as the false.

This is just how an identification with our own insufficiency manifests in the world. We need to show others just how great we are, because, down deep, we are convinced that we’re damaged goods.

As very young children we see, first-hand, how our parents got their way through some expression of force, whether it came in the form of promised rewards, manipulation, or just naked bullying, we learned the lesson of force and we learned it well.

Recently, I became involved in an acrimonious argument with my daughter. She accused me that down deep I believed she was a “fuck-up”. I denied her charge with passion. I told her how much I loved and believed in her. I begged her to check to see if this wasn’t true with several relatives – I asked her to see how I spoke about her ‘behind her back’.

But she is a clever person. In part, I was lying. For on one level I did believe she has been a fuck-up. On so many other ways, I profoundly admire her, I often quote her to friends and family in ways that express her acute insight, her uncanny ability to sniff out bullshit (especially my own!) – and, at least in this conversation, she failed to credit me with any of that. Instead she latched on only to her own self-invalidation and she experienced the same from me.

On one, decisive level, she touched on a profoundly disquieting truth.

Thus, on this level, I quietly expressed the “force” of my own unsaid judgment. She played out the toxicity in her own way and it made me terribly angry, frustrated, and more than anything else sad. This is real life.

But, in the last several days, a powerful revelation has come to me. I have seen the truth of my own insufficient self flail its way in the world, using my own eloquence to escape responsibility and my self-serving absence of full honesty to play the role of the superior person. God, it’s hard to be a parent.

Yesterday I complained to my wife about how some of the people I’m closest with treat me with such anger and dis-respect, even though I tend to be the person who can be depended to do the crap work that these same people depend on. My wife replied that I was an easy target and it was this statement that prompted a great soul searching.

I have come to realize that I have clung onto my own anger with these people, while playing the one-upmanship role as hard-working, if somewhat gruff, victim. I denied my own anger.

This is the great challenge of our individual and collective journey. Allow me to repeat it: As long as our anger is hidden, as long as our fear is hidden, we will be driven to be positive and falsely loving. The only issue is the light, the light of clarity, of truth, of seeing.

Life truly is beautiful. Life truly is generous. It will give us a million chances to see the truth. Life thrusts a mirror into our faces and nearly all of us look away, too scared to look into its depths (or as Herman Melville might have said, “into its deeps” (Moby Dick). Yesterday I looked. Understanding that I cannot control the behavior of others, I can see that my inadequate self clung onto its anger as an expression of intense self-righteousness. It needed the anger. The unfairness and anger I experienced from others has been, in large part, an expression of my own identification with insufficiency. And where there is identification with insufficiency, there will be force used as a psychological weapon. Their anger was my anger.

Last night I saw the anger and fear naked in the stories I have created. I present this rigorous self-honesty to you dear reader so that it may become your own mirror. Until you bring all of the fear and anger to the pure light of life and love, you will be compelled to live a life of false grandeur, of false love, of false caring. For we use what others admire to build our own edifice of the self. This is the great tragedy of the psychological construct we call you and me.

Thus, we are called to find our light and live in its radiance, unborn, vulnerable, open handed, empty handed. For the light shines on all with equal of care and compassion.

Addressing Conflict – Arousing Peace: Using the Principles of Navajo Peacemaking to Achieve Harmony

I have decided to use my many years of experience in Navajo Peacemaking and write a book on how to use these principles in our daily lives. As someone who has worked in the mainstream criminal justice system as well as having received a National Institute of Justice Grant to evaluate and assess Navajo Peacemaking, few people are in a better position to translate these universal ideas and apply them to our everyday lives.

This book will be divided into five sections. They are:

1 – “The Esoteric Must Come First” – this is one of most frequent instructions I received while working with traditional Navajo counselors while conducting my research on the Navajo Nation. The esoteric is, in itself, a profound and potentially life transforming understanding that casts a completely different light on the people in our lives.

2 – “The Principles of Peacemaking” – Taking what we have learned of the esoteric, we can now embark in a thorough understanding of Peacemaking itself.

3 – “The Peaceful Family” – this section is dedicated to the family, children and parents, to help them approach, deal, and settle the many conflicts that inevitably arise in our daily lives. You will learn an entirely new and empowering approach to healing relations ruptured by conflict.

4 – “Reduce and Even Prevent Crime through Peacemaking” – Peacemaking is a proven approach designed to reduce not only the incidence of substance abuse and inter-personal violence, but also to bring radical healing to those people who have participated in violence and those that have suffered as a result.

5- “Applying the Principles of Peacemaking to Bring About a More Peaceful World” – The power of Peacemaking to change the world is something whose time has surely come. I invite the leaders and people of today’s world to take a careful look at this approach to bringing peace to places where war has long prevailed.

The Peacemaking path is one we can all take. We become our own healers in times of stress, chaos, and despair.

Because the writing of this book will take up most of my creative time, my posting to this blog will be less frequent and will tend to focus on the topics that I’ll be writing about in this book.

If you have a special interest in this topic, let me know and I can send up special ‘updates’ to keep you apprised of understanding this timely and vital topic.

Invalidation’s Shadow: The Human Cancer Effect Conclusion

The last two posts talked about human cancer in its pervasive manifestation and its cure. The root of human cancer is invalidation and the cure of invalidation is to reverse its effect through seeing how it plays out in the real world and to abide in the unchanging light of our Authentic Being.

In this final post of this series, I want to talk more about the effects of this cancer on the human level. But more specifically, I would like to illustrate examples that are more extreme, yet often more a part of our everyday lives, than those that are discussed, in detail, in my book. The first post in this series talked about the overarching effect of this cancer. Today we will take a brief look at how invalidation/cancer manifests on the group, regional, and national levels.

The Inner City

In our own society of the United States, we have many zones of invalidation distributed through time and space. One zone, we might know well, is the inner cities of most urban areas in this country. African-Americans arrived in this country as slaves, mere chattel. Their emancipation in 1863 actually changed very little. Without the support of the plantation system they were forced into the even more cruel clutches of rural wage/farm labor. In essence, they remained slaves, but now without the supports of housing or food! This system of indentured wage/slavery continued well into the 20th century. Now we have the vast landscapes of poverty, hopelessness, self-futility and desolation that characterize nearly all of our largest cities.

This is a whole people who have experienced almost nothing but invalidation. So what do we see in these areas? We see abject resignation, profound depression, violence, substance, abuse, and shattered families. We also see strength, love, and solidarity. Invalidation is not of one color. Like everything else, it has a spectrum. Even in the most exploited and negated areas, the vitality of our Authentic Being lives on. What I describe in Liberation from the Lie and these posts should never be read as some kind of simple, unitary effect. No. It varies from person to person, from group to group, and even to nation to nation. But where invalidation is most pervasive, where people are most negated, where communities and families are most broken up, there you will find concentrations of invalidation.

The violent young men and women of the inner city express their innate powerlessness through brutal shows of force often followed by episodes of depression and hopeless futility. We hear many of these young men confident that they will not live to see their 25th birthday. The invalidation effect expresses itself differently by class. The expression from the poor is often more raw, more apparent, but because these communities are so negated and so isolated culturally, we can ignore their cries of need. We can pretend that they don’t exist. We can blame them for our failures. We can live happy that we are not them. The pathos of this relationship of human cancer is so great that words truly escape me. But we can see how the invalidation effects are protected by our immense capacity to deny and blame. This is all part of the hollow world of human cancer where relationships are based on false promises, mutual validation (see the Book), and personal self advantage.

Islam

The Middle East and especially the Persian Gulf region has been a place where cultural invalidation has played a powerful role. First the region was colonized by England and France in the 19th century. Puppet regimes, designed to serve the controlling and extractive needs of the conquerors were established and ever since then, this region has provided their Western masters with the fuel to drive their factories, cars, and war machines. We have used these people and their resources and have every notion of bleeding them dry of the one resource that can bring them the wealth to build locally owned and controlled productive institutions. But the many decades of invalidation have acted to create a monster. More than anything else, invalidation is a polarizing influence. When negation occurs everything becomes more extreme. Thus we observe in the shadow of colonization the creation of radical Islam. When you disenfranchise a people through force and coercion (as the human child is coerced and forced to be as we demand them to be!), we create monsters.

Thus our exploitation and invalidation explains 9/11 and all the carnage that has followed in its wake. Al Qaeda is like an inner city gang. It is configured in rage, implicit powerlessness, and righteous indignation. And we act as if we cannot understand their anger and frustration. We respond to their acts of force as if they have arisen in a vacuum. Instead, we raise the stakes by blaming them for their own abject poverty and neglect. As we heap rage and recrimination on Muslims, we raise our own shining crosses ever higher. We conveniently forget about the massive exploitation, we forget about the 1,000 years of conflict with the Islamic world starting with the Crusades, we forget about the colonization, we forget about how colonization infantilizes a people and their sacred culture, we forget it all and that forgetting is the very manifestation of invalidation in one of its most destructive forms. Our own rage and fury is part and parcel of the very same invalidation. For when human cancer arises, all are sickened. We are the people that flew the planes into the Twin Towers, we are the terror squads that roam the countryside of Afghanistan, we are the violent subjugation of women, we are the the whole process from start to finish and it all begins with invalidation.

The Empire of the United States

My final example is the current world empire, the United States. Unlike the inner cities of America and the dispossessed of the Middle East, the social-culture of the US presents the other side of the invalidation coin. Where those of the inner city and the Persian Gulf region are the depleted side of the negation coin, the Empire is the bloated side. As an empire our marks of success are characterized by sucking. We suck the life out of those regions and people to sustain a culture where the divide between the “haves” and “have-nots” must be large and projected outwards. We suck everything we can from the dispossessed part of the world and thus bloat and expand our own cultural being. We need to show the world just how fantastic it is to own multiple homes, gas guzzling SUVs, every type of power hogging contraption, and all the rest. As an empire we have the luxury of defining to the world what it means to be a success. As the world’s media center we can propagate this image of avarice to all the world. Now every family in China and India would like nothing more than two cars, multiple televisions, and the rest of the material package.

We are driven to have these things for not to have them would mean that we are not a success. Thus our drive to possess all that the world can produce is fueled by a powerful fear of its absence. Without all the material accoutrements of 21st century success, we are, in essence, failures. We have not secured our slice of the empire’s fruit. This is the drive to be someone – someone special – someone safe – someone successful – someone powerful. We can live in our electronic palaces and comfortably blame those dirty people in the inner cities for their own woes and we can blame those dirty people in the Middle East for their own social and economic failures. We can feel as entitled as we possibly can and live oblivious of the truth of our connections with all of that and so much more.

The Universe of Invalidation/Cancer and Its Healing

This is the universe of human cancer. No one fully escapes the shadow of invalidation. And as it has grown in power, the stakes to our survival as a species have grown in proportion. We can’t fully understand the invalidation/cancer effect unless we see, simultaneously, both sides of the process. We are all victims of any compulsive need that is driven by fear and we can only be fear driven when our identity is defined by a belief in our innate inadequacy, insufficiency, and worthlessness. That is the whole basis of the invalidation experience as it is expressed in my book, Liberation from the Lie.

As long as who we believe ourselves to be is defined by a belief founded in our own invalidation/negation, we will continue to feed and nurture human cancer. This need is passed through the generations and becomes the very thing we know best – to our detriment. The violence, the substance abuse, the wars, the depression – all of it will continue unabated. It will not go away with political or social reforms. Rather our healing comes in the individual and group realization in our Authentic Being – that which is not defined by any socially or culturally defined identity. It is that which precedes all identity and links us to all of creation as, not only equals, but as One. Thus looking to our government or our religious leaders for salvation is an utter waste of time. It is a monument to profound entrancement that is a consequence of futile hope. We desperately seek something external to ourselves to complete who we are and to solve all our problems.

That will not work. The only healer we will ever have is ourselves. We are the revolution in consciousness. This is not a matter of getting anything. Rather, it is a matter of return, of shedding the false and allowing the real to reveal itself as a consequence of this healing. This is the power of liberation.

If you would like your own copy of the Cancer Series, please email me at: eric@liberationfromthelie.com and just request the Cancer Series and I will send it to you.

Please spread the word!

Invalidation's Shadow: The Human Cancer Effect Conclusion

The last two posts talked about human cancer in its pervasive manifestation and its cure. The root of human cancer is invalidation and the cure of invalidation is to reverse its effect through seeing how it plays out in the real world and to abide in the unchanging light of our Authentic Being.

In this final post of this series, I want to talk more about the effects of this cancer on the human level. But more specifically, I would like to illustrate examples that are more extreme, yet often more a part of our everyday lives, than those that are discussed, in detail, in my book. The first post in this series talked about the overarching effect of this cancer. Today we will take a brief look at how invalidation/cancer manifests on the group, regional, and national levels.

The Inner City

In our own society of the United States, we have many zones of invalidation distributed through time and space. One zone, we might know well, is the inner cities of most urban areas in this country. African-Americans arrived in this country as slaves, mere chattel. Their emancipation in 1863 actually changed very little. Without the support of the plantation system they were forced into the even more cruel clutches of rural wage/farm labor. In essence, they remained slaves, but now without the supports of housing or food! This system of indentured wage/slavery continued well into the 20th century. Now we have the vast landscapes of poverty, hopelessness, self-futility and desolation that characterize nearly all of our largest cities.

This is a whole people who have experienced almost nothing but invalidation. So what do we see in these areas? We see abject resignation, profound depression, violence, substance, abuse, and shattered families. We also see strength, love, and solidarity. Invalidation is not of one color. Like everything else, it has a spectrum. Even in the most exploited and negated areas, the vitality of our Authentic Being lives on. What I describe in Liberation from the Lie and these posts should never be read as some kind of simple, unitary effect. No. It varies from person to person, from group to group, and even to nation to nation. But where invalidation is most pervasive, where people are most negated, where communities and families are most broken up, there you will find concentrations of invalidation.

The violent young men and women of the inner city express their innate powerlessness through brutal shows of force often followed by episodes of depression and hopeless futility. We hear many of these young men confident that they will not live to see their 25th birthday. The invalidation effect expresses itself differently by class. The expression from the poor is often more raw, more apparent, but because these communities are so negated and so isolated culturally, we can ignore their cries of need. We can pretend that they don’t exist. We can blame them for our failures. We can live happy that we are not them. The pathos of this relationship of human cancer is so great that words truly escape me. But we can see how the invalidation effects are protected by our immense capacity to deny and blame. This is all part of the hollow world of human cancer where relationships are based on false promises, mutual validation (see the Book), and personal self advantage.

Islam

The Middle East and especially the Persian Gulf region has been a place where cultural invalidation has played a powerful role. First the region was colonized by England and France in the 19th century. Puppet regimes, designed to serve the controlling and extractive needs of the conquerors were established and ever since then, this region has provided their Western masters with the fuel to drive their factories, cars, and war machines. We have used these people and their resources and have every notion of bleeding them dry of the one resource that can bring them the wealth to build locally owned and controlled productive institutions. But the many decades of invalidation have acted to create a monster. More than anything else, invalidation is a polarizing influence. When negation occurs everything becomes more extreme. Thus we observe in the shadow of colonization the creation of radical Islam. When you disenfranchise a people through force and coercion (as the human child is coerced and forced to be as we demand them to be!), we create monsters.

Thus our exploitation and invalidation explains 9/11 and all the carnage that has followed in its wake. Al Qaeda is like an inner city gang. It is configured in rage, implicit powerlessness, and righteous indignation. And we act as if we cannot understand their anger and frustration. We respond to their acts of force as if they have arisen in a vacuum. Instead, we raise the stakes by blaming them for their own abject poverty and neglect. As we heap rage and recrimination on Muslims, we raise our own shining crosses ever higher. We conveniently forget about the massive exploitation, we forget about the 1,000 years of conflict with the Islamic world starting with the Crusades, we forget about the colonization, we forget about how colonization infantilizes a people and their sacred culture, we forget it all and that forgetting is the very manifestation of invalidation in one of its most destructive forms. Our own rage and fury is part and parcel of the very same invalidation. For when human cancer arises, all are sickened. We are the people that flew the planes into the Twin Towers, we are the terror squads that roam the countryside of Afghanistan, we are the violent subjugation of women, we are the the whole process from start to finish and it all begins with invalidation.

The Empire of the United States

My final example is the current world empire, the United States. Unlike the inner cities of America and the dispossessed of the Middle East, the social-culture of the US presents the other side of the invalidation coin. Where those of the inner city and the Persian Gulf region are the depleted side of the negation coin, the Empire is the bloated side. As an empire our marks of success are characterized by sucking. We suck the life out of those regions and people to sustain a culture where the divide between the “haves” and “have-nots” must be large and projected outwards. We suck everything we can from the dispossessed part of the world and thus bloat and expand our own cultural being. We need to show the world just how fantastic it is to own multiple homes, gas guzzling SUVs, every type of power hogging contraption, and all the rest. As an empire we have the luxury of defining to the world what it means to be a success. As the world’s media center we can propagate this image of avarice to all the world. Now every family in China and India would like nothing more than two cars, multiple televisions, and the rest of the material package.

We are driven to have these things for not to have them would mean that we are not a success. Thus our drive to possess all that the world can produce is fueled by a powerful fear of its absence. Without all the material accoutrements of 21st century success, we are, in essence, failures. We have not secured our slice of the empire’s fruit. This is the drive to be someone – someone special – someone safe – someone successful – someone powerful. We can live in our electronic palaces and comfortably blame those dirty people in the inner cities for their own woes and we can blame those dirty people in the Middle East for their own social and economic failures. We can feel as entitled as we possibly can and live oblivious of the truth of our connections with all of that and so much more.

The Universe of Invalidation/Cancer and Its Healing

This is the universe of human cancer. No one fully escapes the shadow of invalidation. And as it has grown in power, the stakes to our survival as a species have grown in proportion. We can’t fully understand the invalidation/cancer effect unless we see, simultaneously, both sides of the process. We are all victims of any compulsive need that is driven by fear and we can only be fear driven when our identity is defined by a belief in our innate inadequacy, insufficiency, and worthlessness. That is the whole basis of the invalidation experience as it is expressed in my book, Liberation from the Lie.

As long as who we believe ourselves to be is defined by a belief founded in our own invalidation/negation, we will continue to feed and nurture human cancer. This need is passed through the generations and becomes the very thing we know best – to our detriment. The violence, the substance abuse, the wars, the depression – all of it will continue unabated. It will not go away with political or social reforms. Rather our healing comes in the individual and group realization in our Authentic Being – that which is not defined by any socially or culturally defined identity. It is that which precedes all identity and links us to all of creation as, not only equals, but as One. Thus looking to our government or our religious leaders for salvation is an utter waste of time. It is a monument to profound entrancement that is a consequence of futile hope. We desperately seek something external to ourselves to complete who we are and to solve all our problems.

That will not work. The only healer we will ever have is ourselves. We are the revolution in consciousness. This is not a matter of getting anything. Rather, it is a matter of return, of shedding the false and allowing the real to reveal itself as a consequence of this healing. This is the power of liberation.

If you would like your own copy of the Cancer Series, please email me at: eric@liberationfromthelie.com and just request the Cancer Series and I will send it to you.

Please spread the word!

How to Cure Human Cancer

If we are ever to cure human cancer we must focus on the root rather than merely treat the symptoms. So our first question is this: what is the root of human cancer? And our second question is, who is our healer? How can we find the person who will bring healing to us?

Cancer’s Root

Cancer is a form of war. Healthy cells mutate into cells that wages a war against the very cells which gave them birth. Cancer is division, conflict. The unhealthy, vigorous, voracious cells displace the healthy cells. It begins with health and ends in death.

We too begin in health, but through circumstances entirely out of our control we split into two. The unhealthy self, just like the cancer cells, possesses far more apparent vigor than the quiet, quiescent, balanced healthy self. The self out of balance, quite literally, attracts all of the light of the authentic self. This compulsive self becomes the being we believe ourselves to be. Thus as verbal, functioning human beings, we come to believe that we are the cancer and that this out-of-balance diseased state becomes what we believe to be normal!

How this happens is, like cellular cancer, rather complex and multi-faceted. To truly understand the process in its totality you will either need to fully understand the content of this blog or read my book Liberation from the Lie. Our human cancer is a direct result of a combination of events including our forced separation from our life-givers (our biological parents) and the requirement in civilized society to impart on the pre-verbal and very young child with the understanding that she is not right as she is. The great Greek philosopher Aristotle made this very clear in his extraordinarily influential work The Ethics, where he made the case that children are born as savages and require discipline to learn the arts of civil society. Children need obedience training in order to become civilized.

The separation trauma occurs when the child is forcibly separated from the life-giver in the very first days of life. The practice of separation, which is most common in western cultures is remarkable in how vividly different it is from what we can observe in the hunting and gathering world and those of simple agriculture societies where children are, literally, attached to their life-givers for the first 3-4 years of life. As I said, this is not a simple story, but cancer is not a simple disease. Understanding the details and seeing them in your own life and immediate experience is truly essential, if we are to realize this truth in our own lives.

As a result of the separation trauma and our early childhood education to “get” right, we learn that we must agree with the vital authorities in our life and also reject our “savage” self, that being born from the perfect light of the universe. We come to realize the painful lesson that love is not a birthright – rather it is earned and it is earned through our conforming to the expectations of others, particularly our parents. Even before we can form words, we understand that we are not quite right – there is something wrong with us. This realization becomes our core source of existential pain and suffering. Over time, it becomes the great fear motivator. I call this core belief in our innate inadequacy the Wound.

Through the Wound the unhealthy self is born.

Because the Wound is so painful, we quickly create adaptations to distance ourselves from its effects. We form sub-personas designed to compensate for the terror and self-negation expressed by the Wound. These sub-personas, which I call Fear-Selves, are secondary selves designed to reverse the core self-negating belief expressed by the Wound. Thus we become pleasers – we please our parents (aren’t you a good little girl/boy) and we learn that to get ahead in life we must please those with power over us. Our Fear-based selves will inversely mirror the criticisms of our parents. If they consistently tell us to be smart, their messages will convince our very young and vulnerable minds that we are stupid, if they ignore us, we will learn that we are not worthy of love and attention, etc. etc. etc. And then when we form false, fear-based personas that seek to earn the approval of important others in our life, it is our false (cancerous) selves that become validated and real. We are the pleaser, the expert, the ambitious, the spiritualist, the sexy manipulator, etc. It doesn’t take much time to loose our connection with our authentic, pre-Wound (healthy) self and, ultimately, the only self we really know is our Fear-Based selves!!!!

The root of the human cancer is invalidation that results in the Wound. This is the cause of human cancer. The effect of this cause is the array of Fear-Selves we develop over the first 30 years of our life to compensate for the terrifying content of the Wound. Just as the Wound was created through well-intended invalidation by our parents, we sustain the process by first agreeing with the invalidation and thus becoming self-invalidators, but we maintain the process with our own children. Human cancer is passed through the generations. It can be stopped but only through profound, transformative self-understanding. You will never find your Authentic Self until you fall out of your trance-like relationship with your false-selves.

The human cancer is seen by one decisive behavior. It is this: the drive to become someone out of an underlying fear. This is human cancer.

Finding the Healer

Now that we have a sense of what is the root of the human cancer, we now must find a healer who can bring all of this ‘to light’ in our own lives. For lasting healing is a matter of seeing and understanding that which is false, so as to allow to arise as the false is shed. That healer can only be you. You are the only person who can bring healing to a self that is out of balance. But because we have become so out of touch with our Authentic Being, since we have been cut off from this Self for so long, even believing the content of this message can become an overwhelming challenge for most of us.

The healing path is described in massive detail and with many exercises in my Liberation book. This is the key manual to finding not only your Fear-Selves, but to find the underlying Wound that forms the whole living process of the false self.

It is the task of the healer to be a warrior of the self. It requires the highest level of courage to explore and question everything you have agreed to be true, but which is false.

You must come to know that the Fear-Selves can be extremely subtle. While their underlying life is governed by fear, often they assume forms that appear loving and caring. The difference between authentic love and fear-based love is that the latter is compulsive, necessary, and designed to be seen by the fear-based self and often others. The fear-based love says, look at how loving I can be. The need to be seen is the key attribute of the fear-based self, even if its primary audience is the false self itself. This is the form of love that can turn to hate and contempt in an instant when it fails to achieve its goals. It is a brittle love.

In contrast, authentic love needs to be seen by no one. It is love for its own sake. It has no goals but to be itself real in this very moment. It doesn’t seek to impress the self or others. It is just vital love in the living moment of life. But as we go through this work, the difference between the authentic and the false can be so subtle, that we will often loose ourselves in the process. All of that is just part of healing. We move from false self certainty to confusion and, finally, to light.

Because Fear-Based selves are selves, meaning that they are objects we can hold up to the light of inspection, we come to believe that the Authentic Self is also a self that is, essentially, an object. So we read a book like Liberation from the Lie and this motivates us to improve and to become Authentic. That is yet another false path. It is just a Fear-Self needing to become a better Fear-Self.

True liberation means that you are no longer the slave to any psychological self of any kind. It is not a self. It is light without attributes. It is the living truth of this moment. This is the only true healing reality.

What takes the greatest act of courage and for some of us the great leap of faith is the realization that most of what we believe ourselves to be is the human cancer. The self that needs to be someone is the very self that is out of balance growth that mirrors the cancerous cells on the cellular level. This is growth that kills what is healthy and we kill what is healthy by replacing the subtle, silent, Authentic Self, with the vigorous, aggressive psychology of the Fear-Based self, the self that is birthed by the Wound. Who we believe ourselves is, exactly, who we are not and who we truly are is invisible to the Fear-Selves.

Welcome to the pathless land that is you. You are your only healer. Healing means a return, a forsaking of all that is false and often that means a falling away from just the clusters of belief that we most cherish about ourselves – after all, authentic healing means severing exactly those beliefs with which we are most attached. That is a truly heroic act of self-realization.

Can you take that path? If you can’t, don’t feel badly about yourself. Few are able to be their own healer. But I know that you will take this path when you finally get disgusted with the second-hand life. If you have reached that point then I invite you to explore Liberation from the Lie or if you have read it already – read it again. It is the manual of self-discovery.

I had intended to include examples of human cancer on the individual, group, and species levels in this post, but it has already become too long. So I will do that in tomorrow’s post and I will link those examples with this discussion so that our understanding of human cancer evolves to be the light of our own healing.

Please spread the word.

Healing Depression: Discovering the Subtle Healing Energy of the Wound

In yesterday’s post I dealt with some of the larger ‘theoretical’ issues posed by the experience of depression. I placed these issues within the rigorous context of my book, Liberation from the Lie and thus sought to draw the “big picture” of depression; that it is the effect of an intensely powerful, but directly unseen Wound – that this Wound originated with our abrupt separation from our life givers (parents) in the very first days of our life.

In today’s post I want to focus not on its origins, but on the effect of the Wound in our immediate experience. If we can spot it in our moment-to-moment life, we will be empowered to bring healing attention, as well as understanding, to this vast pool of pain and fear that lies at the core of our temporal being (personality – self construct).

I once wrote about how two scientists working for Bell Labs back in the 1960s first stumbled upon the background hiss/static of the Big Bang, the cataclysmic event that gave birth to the known universe. They were listening to radiant energy received by a large radio telescope and noticed a very subtle background ‘noise’ that seemed to emanate from everywhere in the universe. At first they could not explain what this noise was, but over time they were able to link this static to the very residue of the massive explosion from which everything in our universe owes its origin.

The Wound is the Big Bang of our personality. It too presents an extremely subtle background ‘noise’ to our immediate experience. I was not able to even detect this noise at first because I didn’t have a theoretical construct on which I could explain its existence. But the Theory of the Wound and its compensating Fear-Selves provided me with a vehicle for which I could not only “hear” this residue, but also to explain its existence. It was like hearing the voice of God – the Theory of Liberation powerfully explained even the most subtle aspects of our moment-to-moment existence.

One of the reasons so many of us experience these dark prolonged periods in our lives is because we are completely unaware of the initial signs that suggest the possible onset of a Fear-Self personality collapse. Now let me say something that will surprise you. Such collapses, as awful as they sometimes are, can offer us opportunities for very profound self-realization, and thus to label them as “bad” or as “problems that need to be solved” is really off the mark. That is an error. But like any other serious malady, when they become very intense, they call for medical intervention. The really good news is that the content of this post will present us with an approach to harnessing the power of inner-upsetness-chaos we can do at any time. We don’t have to wait for a full Fear-Self breakdown (please see the book for this vital issue which will, one day, confront each one of us).

Just like the scientists at Bell Labs, you will need to attune your ‘inner radar’ to the physical sense of your self. Do that now. Probe for the most subtle energies that exist beneath the levels of thought and emotional feeling. And very much like these scientists, you should ‘pick-up’ a kind of nearly silent inner static – a kind of very subtle nervous energy. You may have to listen for some time, but once you get the hang of this, you should be able to get a feel for it at any time.

As you sense this nervous-like energy that is like a nearly silent static deep within your body, understand that what you’re feeling is the very emanations of your own primal Wound. You are, literally, hearing the origins of your personality as they were forged in your own separation trauma. This is the subtle vibration of the Wound in your immediate life.

Just watch the energy. Here is a key feeling that I discovered about my own inner vibration. When I began to feel stress in my immediate life, I noticed that this deep Wound energy would link up with the stress/anxiety … that it would kind of nurture it. As I followed this pathway, I could see how it nurtured a psychological energy that would create anger and wanted to apply force to challenging life circumstances to achieve a level of control. As I explored this amazing link, I could see that what was happening was that stress stimulated the Wound energy. The existing Fear-Self (often a Fear-Self needing to know itself as highly competent in the world), would feel threatened by circumstances that it could not control. The tools it sought to deal with this fear was anger and force.

Seeing all of this as a single piece, a unitary process, showed me, in the most vivid way, how the Wound fosters the prevailing Fear-Self and that when the Fear-Self encountered circumstances that threatened its standing in the world, it would empower and enlarge its presence with anger and hostility. The Wound and Fear-Self were truly One.

You will discover the identical relationship in your own personality, but first you must be grounded in a perception of the subtle inner vibration – the living static of the Wound in your immediate experience. That is certainly Step One. Then observe how this inner feeling changes when you encounter even very small stressors in your life. See what happens. Explore the inter-play of the Wound and Fear-Selves in your own life.

So how might we address the subtle emanations of the Wound once we are armed with this remarkable knowledge? Here is the Way.

Violence, depression, frustration, and hopelessness are all experiences of a failed Fear-Self and our contraction into the scary world of the Wound. But they are not sound or healing contractions. They are merely convenient operations of a negative Fear-Self struggling with circumstances that he can no longer control and which he fears.

We move toward integration and love through integration and love. Thus, what I suggest is to simply feel this subtle energy and direct respect, honor, and love to it. What we have called the Wound is nothing less than the child of the cosmos separated from the ever-nurturing universe. When you love and respect it, you are reversing the process of invalidation that created it in the first place. This is so key. We bring healing to the Wound by first getting a feel for its very existence before it has totally disabled our life, and then to channel love, respect, and honor to it. In this way we reverse the invalidation process, embrace our essential selves and discover a new fount of energy in our own lives.

Know that habit will try to upset this process. The static energy of the Wound will want to travel paths that it knows well. It will want to foster panic, confusion, anger, and retreat. Just see how this whole process unfolds and over time you will get a detailed sense of the process. Learning this healing technique is a little like learning how to ride a bike for the first time. It might feel a little awkward, but in a short period of time, you will get the hang of it.

Please know that our purpose is never to do way with the Wound. Were we to try that or believe we could do that, we would be doing ourselves the greatest possible harm. If we were to try to kill the Wound, we would be sustaining the process of massive self-negation and invalidation that gave it birth in the first place. We would simply be operating from the position of another Fear-Self struggling to impose control in a psychological world based on separation and belief in the false (I’ve introduced some new concepts here, but please don’t too caught up with them). Just know that our purpose is to love, respect, and honor … and Notice. That is all. Anything more than this results in the birth of a new Fear-Self, often the “Spiritual” Fear-Self and we really need to avoid this misery enhancing pathway.

The Wound is a permanent aspect of our psychological selves. Thus our understanding guides us to love what is common to each of us and to learn the path of authentic compassion with this understanding. We start with ourselves and with that understanding, we allow that realization to inform our moment-to-moment lives.

Late Addition:

The more you do this exercise when you’re not feeling stressed the more powerful the life-enhancing qualities of the Wound will be in your life. The more you notice this inner static and fully embrace it as the one place that needs your attention and love, the more you will be released from its power to make your life a misery and a struggle.

This is authentic healing.

How to Heal the 2 Americas

Phil Bluehouse - One of My Healers - Blessings to You

John Edwards, the now justly reviled ex-senator from North Carolina, spoke often about the 2 Americas. He was referring to the Haves and Have-Nots of this country and his focus was economic. He took this argument one step further when he made it clear that the Republicans were the party of the Haves and the Democrats were the party of the Nots (have-nots).

As appealing as his message was to many (myself included), he made two critical errors. His first error was that he ignored America’s ethnic and cultural divide. There are the many millions of white, Christian Americans who insist that they are the real Americans. Those of color, those that are gay, those that are Moslem (or Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, whatever) are not as American as they are. These real Americans don’t really hide their contempt for diversity. The other America, which includes many white Christians, is one whose identity is not race or faith based. This America celebrates its diversity and strongly rejects the cultural idea of an America that is fundamentally white, Christian, always straight, and oppressively patriarchal.

So Yes – there are two Americas, but on one dyad it is defined economically and on the second spectrum it is cultural. They overlap in interesting ways. But when we understand this enormous divide, we can see why the Have-Nots will never be able to effectively organize as a force to reform (or replace) the power elite rule of America. For it is with the very elites, who enjoy exploiting their loyalty to fight their wars and pay their taxes, that this real America so strongly identifies with. It would be funny, were it not so painful.

The other error made by Edwards was that the Democrats represent the Have-Nots. Both parties represent the Haves. Their rhetoric varies and the Dems will give occasional lip service to the needs of the “Nots”, but both parties suck from the same teets of the military industrial, mega-corporate, health conglomerate (“MILICORPCON”). The eat from the same pig trough and play the essential game of election campaigns that offer choice with the knowledge that Americans are naive and stupid enough to continue supporting the very entities that are sucking their life blood and leaving them littering the streets with their hollowed out bodies and devastated towns. It’s a game which the Haves must win and the Nots must lose.

It’s rigged from the get-go – but that truth is so uncomfortable that few of us are willing to admit it.

What prevents America from ever moving forward is the massive gaping Wound that lies in the very heart of our national fabric. And this is where I turn to the message of my book,Liberation from the Lie, to bring all of this together. We have a national Wound and that Wound is all about the other 2 – the hidden 2.

I am referring to the war of extinction waged against the Native people of the Americas that began on that very morning when Columbus first laid foot on this American land in 1492 and I am talking about the importation of millions of slaves into this land from Africa. The great power of this land was built on a foundation of genocide. All of that happened and we know it.

So how did we address this massive gaping whole in our cultural being? We covered it up with banal stories of our Manifest Destiny, of our rightful place on this land, on the myth of the white Christian Man who cleared the forests to make way for wonderful farms and fabulous cities. We relegated the Native People to pitiful places where all the good land is still own by Whites (YES even on Reservations!) and our immense national racism has succeeded to convince Black folks that they are truly not welcome as equals unless they do the Christian bourgeois dance for their continuing masters.

Our Fear-Self is the very notion that we are this land of the free and the brave who are neither free nor especially brave. We live in a dream designed to compensate for our bloody sins. This is the one dream that unites the Haves and the Nots. As long we sustain this banality, we will never survive. Not only will we fail as a nation and collapse on the rubbish heap of other failed empires, but we will bring down many around us, for our ugly dream gives us a violent swagger that others find contemptuous at best.

Our collective healing comes in discovering what is true in our nation and in our hearts. The challenge of waking up is, clearly, not just an individual matter. It is the fundamental national issue.

We must come to this truth as a supplicant. We must fall to our knees and apologize for what we have done. We must open our hands, our hearts, and our wallets to the dispossessed.

We must dis-abuse ourselves from our own national Fear-Self. We need to bring the searing light of what is true to our National Wound and show it to the world. Germany has done this with their own recent horrific history. It was relatively easy for them, since their crimes were created by a regime seen as profoundly deviant by all but the few and demented. They were not allowed to sleep in the sweetness of their own ignorance. Their massive crimes were brought to light and they had no choice but to lay themselves open. And, by doing so, they have provided profound healing.

A very similar scenario was followed in South Africa with their Truth and Reconciliation hearings that followed in the wake of the collapse of the white apartheid regime. They took a giant step toward national healing and solidarity with their commitment to truth and justice built on a foundation of forgiveness.

We can do the same and if we don’t, we will fail as a nation. We will just die and our vain monuments will be ignored. The truth cannot be believed away forever. Underneath all the clouds of denial and obfuscation, the truth still shines. That is the very core message of Liberation from the Lie. Your own individual truth shines in your own heart shining its light on everything everywhere. You will continue believing in your stories until you don’t. But the more you put off realizing your own truth by seeing what is false (your beliefs), you will continue to suffer the pain and bleeding of your own Wound.

This is all about healing. The healing must come first. Become your own physician and bring the loving healing light to yourself – to your neighborhood, to your community, to your nation, and to your world. When that moment arrives you will all but drown in your own thankfulness and the earth – the flowers, the birds, the wind, the seas, and the mountains, will rejoice with you. The great thread that connects all of life in you – its unity – will be seen and felt again and you will be One in This.

Liberation Delivers to You The Cure for Anxiety and Depression

The next five posts on this blog will deliver to all who choose to listen a cure for anxiety and depression. So stay tuned!

This will be the What-Why-Who-How-Wow of healing. These processes will work for you.

This won’t be a touchy-feely approach. It won’t be intellectual either. It will be a hard look at what is true and what is false. The Truth Will Set You Free and when we can see the false as false and the true as true, you are free. I assure you of that.

You too will believe this to be true. There is only one ground rule that I ask you to take seriously. You need to be ruthlessly honest with yourself. Right now you are in LOVE with a lie (hence the Lie in the title of my book Liberation from the Lie). All you will need to do is fall out of love with this lie.

Here is the first truth: If you’re persistently depressed or anxious – then you are believing in ideas and identities that have absolutely no basis in truth. You are living in darkness and, to make matters appear worse, you are living in a trance.

The purpose of these posts will be to awaken you of the falseness which you now assume are true. In these posts you are asked to suspend belief in what you believe is true. Unless you’re willing to do this, the healing power of these posts cannot work for you.

So be brave – learn how to become your own healer.

Later today (May 7,2009), the first post WHAT will be posted. If you have any questions about its content, you need to contact me. Ask questions, demand the truth.

One last proviso. Know that no one can heal you but you. There are no therapists, counselors, partners, or gurus who can make us see the truth. Only we can do that. So the responsibility for our own healing lies in our own hearts and minds. Let this power delight you.

You have all you need right now. Know this truth first and be ready to take the first step.