Are You Being Controlled
By Someone You Know?
The social controls that define you are hateful to the self, and society firmly perpetuates them. These controls are felt but are consciously unseen, and until you accept the need to become, they will elude you and life will remain empty.
Closer Look at the Journey
A journey of God happens where ever a person transcends the limitations of physical reality and goes into the deeper reality of the meaning of To Be. When Love transcends personal experience, intimacy with God is felt, but this is a process that takes careful study of the self. A Journey of God is a process of unlocking the fear that’s between you and God so that divine intimacy can be found.
Experiencing God
A journey of God begins with a discovery that there is something missing in life. When this happens, one comes to understand that there’s a need for a journey, because without a journey, one remains in the emptiness that one has found oneself.
What’s at stake
- Not embarking on the journey bears a meaningless life
- Life lacks the spark of newness and spontaneity
Difficulties
- Society offers security in daily life, but often dismisses fulfillment and purpose.
- To question the status quo is terrifying because one feels out of control. The world that’s accepted will not support questioning and feels threatened by those who do.
Where is God
When one does not understand or accept That I Am, one at the end bears the burden of a meaningless life. But to know That I Am is to know that you are transcendent to everything. For those who have reached the end of life with no meaning, who are grasping at straws, ultimately they will abandon things and understand Love.
What’s at stake
- Not discovering That I Am is to fail to know the meaning and value of life at essence
- Without That I Am is to live in emptiness
Difficulties
- The world that’s known is threatened by That I Am
Encounter With God
A journey of God is not a place, an idea, an objective, nor somewhere you go to. It is a discovery that you are. It is where ever a person transcends the limitations of physical reality and goes into the deeper reality of meaning. It is only known by experience because there is no definition, and it perpetuates a discovery of absolute intimacy: you are so intimate that you are at the touch of Love.
What’s at stake
- Choosing to ignore experiences of deeper meaning, is to continue to exist under the control and definitions of others.
- Until one accepts the need to become, life will be empty.
Difficulties
- There can never be proof of deeper meaning, one must trust their own direct experience.
The World Will Hate You
There are several ways that our social order structures experience: there’s larger offices as we rise up the corporate ladder, or we wear more red as we go up the church ladder. We mark out with distinctions, the success in the passage. After getting the red crown or the big office, one asks “What do I have? Is that what I was looking for? What have I creatively experienced in who I am?”
What’s at stake
- Being bound by existing definitions means to always be under the control of other.
- If your experience does not transcend the meaning of the world you live in, then you will remain bound to the limitations and definitions of the world around you.
Difficulties
- Social controls are hateful to the self, and society constantly perpetuates them.
- The forces that imprison us are felt but are consciously unseen
- It’s easy to get caught in a combination of the need of society, because it requires order, and seeking to build who you are, which has no boundary
The Truth Will Set You Free
Social controls are not your enemies, rather they teach you to change your perception. Having the experience of touching I Am opens the door of perception, and on each touch your choices become larger. Upon seeing from this new place, you can now make choices that reflect the love and value of self and start building your relationship to the world in a more meaningful way.
What’s at stake
- If you never open your perceptions, you will never be able to think for yourself.
Difficulties
- The first step into a new perception is the most difficult because it means surrendering familiarity and security.
- The sense of belonging with others is lost.
- If you choose not to perceive, you perpetuate the choices of imprisonment and limitations.
No Other Gods
The moment you challenge control, you challenge the security of other. If you move out of the realm of another’s perceptual acceptance, you immediately by your existence, force them to question what they perceive. The controlling social force at that point is totally naked and defenseless.
What’s at stake
- The controlling social norm will attempt to strike you down because you will be a danger to them.
- If you do not challenge control, you will remain a slave to those controls
Difficulties
- The danger is that that person who sees the world through different eyes ultimately will pay the Socratean price.
- You will be removed from any controlling society if their perception cannot rule you.
- All societies are fearful of that which will challenge the stasis of what is understood.
Where Your Treasure Is
At the level of our animal nature, we are collectivistic: a lion hunts a herd of wildebeests, and the closer a wildebeest is to the center the better, because if it’s on the edge the lion can get it. The herd provides safety, and the pack doesn’t allow for difference because it would split. The security that we need denies us the right to question the journey that we’re on.
What’s at stake
- Not separating from the herd means to accept never being fully alive.
- Never being able to trust your intuition.
Difficulties
- The pack will fight to keep you in the herd.
- Those who are close will often not understand.
Do Not Be Conformed
When you face the reality that you’ve created who you are, you may have to leave everything behind. The greatest challenge will be can you change sufficiently in your own discovery of yourself to accommodate the difference of who you will become?
What’s at stake
- If you stay where you are, the core challenge that feeds your life will be lost.
Difficulties
- There’s a fear of taking responsibility for one’s behavior, because the minute that you ask “Who Am I,” you’re taking responsibility for that answer.
- Choosing to separate from the pack is to risk the loss of everything that is familiar.
- We are all afraid of the loss of ourselves as well as the gaining of ourselves.
Hope In God
The minute you ask “Who Am I” you are also asking “Who am I not” and “What could I be?” By asking the question, you’re presuming there are other choices and definitions, and you’re already in change. You’re taking a step toward courage when you ask that question, because you’re taking responsibility for who you are. This is hope in action.
What’s at stake
- You will perpetually live in uncertainty and fear if you don’t question the world around you
- You will never learn how to enforce internal boundaries if you don’t build your true self.
Difficulties
- You can’t change until you know what you’re changing from
- When you truly question your world, everything becomes uncertain
- As you remember each moment of choice in your life, it’s impossible to assign success and failure to the individual occurrences by measuring from the time of the choice
Following God
Success and failure are perceptions of two parts of the same coin. If you don’t achieve a singular objective, that may be the success of a different objective that you didn’t know was there. If you are not conformed to a controlling society, you don’t have to worry about success or failure, because failure and success are social controls of definition. Following God is governed only by the totality of Love, which is beyond definition.
What’s at stake
- If you do not ask “Who I am,” you cannot lay down a path to follow and you remain in chaos.
- Unless you find a path that reveals new and different levels of experience, limited social definitions will always measure your value.
Difficulties
- Upon stepping away, you will be challenged to return to the prior world, chastised for your foolishness of having left it.
- There is no guarantee that the world will want to hear what you have seen.
Seek First the Kingdom
On a journey of God, you need your own acceptance. On a journey without God, you need acceptance from others. In the discovery of That I Am, and the journey through That I Am to the absolute center of your becoming, it’s not necessary to surrender anything, but rather to alter your understanding to reflect a deeper truth. In order to do this, you are the one that must change.
What’s at stake
- If you don’t choose a journey of God, then your life never has full expression, and your life follows a half-lived path.
Difficulties
- Old wounds are never really healed and forgotten, but rather you must find a way to learn from them so as not to assault yourself or others.
The Road to Salvation
What is it in the social controls that prevent you from discovering That I Am? How does social control prevent you from acquiring the experiential knowledge of That I Am? When you answer That I Am, it is an experience: a feeling of your being.
What’s at stake
- Turning away from the road to salvation means cutting yourself off to individual self expression and flow.
Difficulties
- Peak experiences offer a preliminary glimpse into a journey of God, but this experience is often held as the most glorious, and then questioning stops.
- Those who continually pursue peak experiences will end up re-living past moments of glory, and never take another step into themselves.
Walk Humbly
We always walk the inner and outer journey simultaneously, and what drives us further inward to ask That I Am is an outer dissatisfaction. After experiencing That I Am, you can then start to build yourself toward the divine mind, rather than from the limited image of your ego. And in so doing, the arrogance that is separating you from God is slowly peeled away with each small step. The further you go in, the more Love will be discovered, and the more humble you’ll become.
What’s at stake
- The person that does not take the journey because they are under too much social control, are left at the end of life asking “Was it worth it? Did I do anything? Did I have value? Do I have worth? Will someone miss me?” And the answers will be difficult at best.
Difficulties
- A person who was beaten or damaged psychologically, often recoils from being either part of the community or rejected by it. They push themselves away from the journey because they will not examine the pain that crushed them. And that builds to a desire to destroy the community that caused the pain. If left alone, this individual will either become violent or destroy themselves.
The Voice of God
When you look at the journey, the exterior part of it teaches in its deepest form, that there is a journey beyond the exterior, deeper inside. If you choose to take the inner journey, regardless of social definitions, you will experience a complete and absolute point of life as you walk. And as you make your way with small steps, your increasing clarity will force a major change in your life, and that change will be comforted by a love that was not known before.
What’s at stake
- If you cannot find more meaning than your best peak experiences, you’ll be limited to competitive or meaningless relationships that are void of intimacy.
Difficulties
- A football player who has a glorious moment and becomes one with the play, has an experience that is real. If he never takes another step inward, that play will remain the most real thing that he ever experienced, and it will be so solid that he won’t let go of it. If he does not journey inward, he will be locked there for the rest of his days. He will tell the story over and over again, and sometimes he will even be able to relive the experience. There are people for whom that is the high point of their entire life and they will talk about it until the day they die.
Surrender to God
When you look outwards, what can be seen has no meaning until you can bring it inward. You are called to the mystical journey when you realize that what’s out there is inside, and to actually see requires moving inward. The journey opens for those who understand that wherein they have walked before no longer answers the question of why they’re on the journey.
What’s at stake
- If you do not look deeply inward, you will never move out into the broader world.
Difficulties
- There will always be powerful cynics who will deny and diminish the value of an inward journey.
God Will Make a Way
The mystics, the seers, those who have passed through the dark night of the soul and whom God has taken up on his hand, testify to the glory and reality of God’s Love. The intense joy of dancing in God’s hand is experienced when you surrender to the reality that the creator is creating you, and you’re perpetually creating from that point.
What’s at stake
- Until you fully surrender, your life will be built on a foundation of social controls, and you will remain a slave to them regardless of what you build.
Difficulties
- To fully surrender is to be uncertain of survival.
- Surrendering is an experience of self destruction, and feels counter intuitive.
The Leap of Faith
The leap of faith is an act of both total surrender and desperate need. Once you discover that the world as you have seen it has defined who you are and what you believe; you can no longer sit on the dividing line of maybe or maybe not, because that line is meaningless. You are left either to become the cynic or to leap. There’s no alternative.
What’s at stake
- If you never leap, you’ll never truly know what is beyond yourself.
Difficulties
- If you have not had the fall, there is no language in which to describe it. Therefore it is not in control.
- The leap of faith is affirmed after it has been made.
The Dark Night of the Soul
The dark night of the soul must be experienced on your own, but you cannot do it on your own, because you cannot bring yourself out of it. You cannot step into the darkness on your own and you cannot cross the valley on your own. When you go into the dark night of the soul, there is total despair. And you will not be guided out unless God wills it. That’s where you are burned and cleansed of all your ego and arrogance.
What’s at stake
- Without the experience of the dark night, you cannot fully break through the false self.
Difficulties
- The void is in the dark night of the soul, and it is a complete abandonment by God. It is the totality of despair.
I Am the Resurrection
Once lifted out of the dark night of the soul, you can now see the previous world totally in the eyes of a child. You now have an affirmation of faith which gives you hope, and this affirmation leads you to believe the truth of your experience. With this new life of Love, comes a fresh hope to be able to inspire with it.
What’s at stake
- Unless you return to the old world, your experience of divine Love will die with you.
Difficulties
- Everyone who has taken any of the leaps ultimately has to return to the society in some way.
- As you return to the previous society, you’re going to become one with it. You will be praised as the writer, or condemned as the thinker. Depending on how your experience touches the reality of others, you will be revered or you will be despised.
Knowing God
There’s only one security in life: to know That I Am. Everything else is within it. What you become, what you do, who you are, where you are, all the questions of your being are within the single security: That I Am, for that question is answered.
What’s at stake
- Unless you know That I Am, you live a life of vanity, emptiness, and meaninglessness.
- Unless you know That I Am, you do not know the source of your life, your perception, your perceptibility, and ultimately your feeling.
- Unless you know That I Am, you cannot love in the deepest sense, because That I Am loves your neighbor as yourself, which is the love of the self that will love your neighbor.
Difficulties
- It’s always easier to love in the abstract than in the particular. Because in the particular you see the warts and the fine lines and smell the smells. And in the distance you see the golden illusion at the top and crown. If that golden illusion does not come down to the earth, then you have not climbed the mountain.
- “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, thy whole soul, thy whole mind,” but how do you go about doing that? You do that as Isaiah would tell you in varying prophecies, by loving your neighbor. And how do you love your neighbor? By loving the self That I Am. And once you love That I Am, you cannot not love your neighbor.
Christian Figures of the Journey
Thomas Merton
American Mystic Trappist Monk
Best known for his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, Merton taught how common social life can steer one away from God if the definitions from that system are not challenged.
St. John of the Cross
Spanish Mystic Carmelite Friar
His book, Dark Night of the Soul, is considered the greatest literary work from Spain. He taught about the growth of the soul and about greater intimacy when the soul responds to God’s Love.
Julian of Norwich
English Mystic and Anchoress
Julian believed that sin was necessary in life because it brings one to self knowledge and into relationship with God. She believed that in order to learn, we must fail, and to fail, we must sin.
Thomas Acquinas
Martin Luther King
Mother Teresa
Teresa of Ávila
St. Francis
Meister Eckhart
Scholars of the Journey
Carl Gustav Jung
Historic Psychotherapist
Jung saw that the unconscious has tremendous force, and it makes its way into the conscious by primordial images. To be healthy, he believed an individual needs to assimilate with the messages that come from the unconscious.
Joseph Campbell
Teacher of Myth Celebrated Author
Often cited as Campbell’s best book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces illustrates a fundamental human transformation that occurs in all societies, appears in all belief systems, and drives the stories from the world’s great mythologies.
Howard Thurman
Educator, Pastor Civil Rights Leader
As a Dean who published 21 books, and having lead the non-violent ideas of the civil rights movement, Thurman has had a profound impact on the American and global consciousness quietly from the background of service and academia.
William James
Sigmund Freud
CS Lewis
Eric Berne
Claude Steiner
Erik Erikson
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