I’ve been drafting a few posts on some matters of interest that arise from new volunteers joining this site as well as a mushrooming of lightworker projects. Although I’m not an expert in these matters, and don’t wish to represent myself as one, I do feel that we need to discuss at least among ourselves some pitfalls than can arise when we begin to work together as teams.
In this article, I wanted to address a tendency we have when we begin to work together. In a reading on March 8, 2012, Archangel Michael described what happens when people join together on a project.
“You have come together in this flurry of trust and understanding and faith. But then what often happens, particularly within your dimensional reality, is people begin to back away. You meet somebody, you really like them and then you decide, well, I don’t like this. I don’t like that. This offends me. And so you start to back up.” (1)
And when we start to back up, we begin to reason with ourselves. And sometimes what we say to ourselves is that the person who has offended us needs to change. In brief, what I wish to say here is to question the whole line of thinking that says that people – us or others – need to change.
Change as a way of handling things may turn out to be counterproductive. It may turn out to simply add a new layer to the problem. What people may find they need to do is to become aware. The rest will take care of itself.
Werner Erhard first brought this circumstance to my attention. And perhaps let me work up to it. If we want to cause an unwanted condition, like an upset or a traumatic memory to disappear from our lives, what we need to do is experience the feelings associated with it through completely. And perhaps not simply once but a few times.
If we want an unwanted condition to persist, all we need to do is to resist it. What we resist persists.
What Werner pointed out, and it took me a few years to get it, was that change is often resistance. At first glance that’s a startling statement because most of us assume that when we change we improve something. But change is not experiencing something through to completion; change is doing things a different way and has no necessary relationship to experiencing something completely.
“Experiencing something completely” he would call transformation. Change he would call a change in form. Rather than changing the form of something, he would recommend we transform it. Otherwise we’re merely adding another layer of reaction to the original upset or unwanted condition.
All this has a realm of applicability and non-applicability. If someone is packing a pistol and the anger to use it, well, OK, change the situation: Take away the pistol. But I assume that we all know we’re discussing the middle ground and not the extremes.
In the middle ground, change is usually not the answer. So what is?
In my view, simple awareness is the answer.
This will seem like a radical statement to some. But I think we’ll find that, when we raise something to our awareness, our ability to do it, if it is harmful, is severely impaired. We work harm best outside awareness. Inside awareness – conscious awareness, that is – it becomes difficult to be harmful.
I could get very metaphysical about this. I could say that God is awareness and the application of the medicine called God is always restorative.
I could say that, when we are in awareness, we are subject to a second design feature of life: namely, the voice of conscience, which functions better when something has been raised to our awareness.
Whatever way we wish to view the matter, in my experience, the thing that results in change more completely than change itself is awareness.
Please know that to become aware can often be a radical activity. It challenges our attachments, our stories about ourself, the image we’re projecting, our self-serving tendencies. It threatens to expose it all. Some people, when they become aware and communicate what they’ve become aware of, upset the power balance in their relationships, annoy their bosses, and challenge their friends. So the path of awareness isn’t always easy.
But despite the costs and the risks, I still recommend that you and I and all of us become aware of what we’re doing, thinking, and feeling. Some sage said the proper study of mankind is man. (Apologies for the sexism.) Someone else said: Know Thyself. Apart from the deeper mystical meaning of these sayings, they’re helpful at a surface level too. Because if we observe ourselves and get to know what we do, why and how we do it, the mere act of awareness can often straighten out the wrinkles in our character.
Just open to the awareness of yourself. Let go of thinking about changing for the moment. Just see how we be and what we do. Watch ourself breathe. Feel what is rising and falling within our field of awareness. Especially at this time as we approach Ascension, you (or me) are the item or the object, if you will, that needs to occupy an inordinate amount of our attention. Ascension itself is all about us and it calls for us to raise our own awareness of ourselves and raise our own awareness of the divine qualities in us, especially love.
So before we think of changing, we might wish to try increasing our awareness. Just be with that we thought of changing and become aware of it. Follow ourself as we do it, without judging, without resisting. I’ve found that simply this is enough to unravel a problem and have it disappear without my necessarily knowing how I did it.
Awareness of ourselves, I assert, is the real change-maker and nowhere more than now. Unbroken awareness of ourself, the observation of our every mood and impulse, followed in time by the same attention to another, without feeling we need to act, correct, or change, is in effect a divine state and will cause the unworkable in us to melt away effortlessly. That’s been my experience. And it’s what guides me in my own spiritual practice of awareness.
And if I’m wrong, well, hey, nothing relaxes more than self-awareness. At the outside, we’ll all end up more relaxed and peaceful.
Footnotes
(1) Reading with Archangel Michael, March 8, 2012.