The First Key
- Do Not Believe in Loss or Gain
"Do not believe in loss or gain" is our
first key, and it opens the lock between the throat chakra (fifth)
and the third-eye chakra (sixth). Crucial to our understanding here
is not to believe the egoic programming about loss, and of course
it also involves not believing in its opposite, gain, either. Loss
and gain are a polarized duality and are inseparable.
Now you may truly believe that there is such a thing as loss and gain,
and in the old reality it certainly appears to be true--that is, "seeing
is believing". Yet the truth of our eternal beingness is that
nothing can be added to us that is not already there, and conversely
nothing can be taken away from who we already are. We are perfect,
complete and absolutely whole. When we know this truth, we are in
our most natural state.
The idea of loss and gain is a program held in the matrix of third-dimensional
egoic programming, and in a sense is nothing more than an idea held
in the limited mind. Therefore it is essential on the path of Self-
discovery to clear the shadow of loss and gain to find liberation
from the third dimension.
Let's look at this key in terms of our schematic of the subtle body.
Our consciousness naturally perceives inter-connectedness and ultimately
unity consciousness at the third eye and above, at the crown chakra.
This is in addition to finding it in the core-should we be able to
enter there. Below the third eye and on down through the chakras,
the ego perceives duality. This is where the third eye, the one single
eye, located roughly between the eyebrows, becomes the two-the dual
physical eyes. This spot between the third eye and the two physical
eyes is the origin of our either-or mind, the mind that flip-flops
from one side of a polarity to the other. It is in this spot, below
the third eye, that subtle meridians of energy begin-upward and downward
flows of awareness from which we perceive duality. They rotate around,
in a double-helix, surrounding and veiling the core. It is here that
awareness is deceived into the program of extreme polarization of
the third dimension and where our true, eternal perceiver becomes
veiled and clouded.
In Matthew 6:22, Jesus said, "If therefore thine eye be single,
thy whole body shall be full of light." He was referring to the
fact that when our flow of awareness ascends permanently to the third
eye, becoming established there, then not only does the body become
filled with energy manifesting as light, but when it is vibrating
fast enough, we become illumined and permanently conscious of our
true nature as unity.
Loss
Means Loss of Energy
When the ego feels it has suffered a loss, the mental, emotional and
physical bodies contract and lose their light. They become deprived
of energy, or life force. This loss of life force brings up deep-seated
fears in the ego that make it react with certain behaviors, such as
the need to defend and protect itself from further loss.
At the very root of the loss of life force lies the fear of death.
When the egoic mind extrapolates extreme loss of life force, it feels
death approaching. For within the limited knowledge of the ego, the
total loss of life force equals the total loss of everything. The
ego fears loss because only it can die. Who "you" truly
are, can never die.
Overall, the consciousness of the third dimension is based on loss
and gain. Experiencing loss drops awareness out of the natural unified
state, which, unbeknownst to us, we are in more than we realize, mostly
when we feel contentment or peace. It does not matter if it is a big
loss or a small loss. Big and small are relative perceptions of the
limited, egoic mind.
Watch how your mind will immediately pick up on a thought that has
the kernel of loss woven into it. The mind is hyper-vigilant about
loss; it is watching constantly for signs of potential losses. Observe
how thoughts that even hint at the possibility of loss drop your awareness
into exhaustion-loss of energy. Loss is not only associated with material
possessions or the loss of loved ones in relationships; there are
many other kinds of loss. Some examples of loss would be, disapproval,
criticism, blame, rejection, betrayal, abandonment, self-doubt, lack
of self-esteem, withholdings and grievances. Loss can be so many things
on so many levels: loss of face, of dignity, of energy, of happiness,
of connectedness, of resources, of inspiration, of your divine state
and so forth. There are many more. In fact, any experience of the
negative side of any duality would contain a tonality of loss.
Perhaps you can't find your toothbrush, and it is making you crazy.
It is a small loss, but it is enough to spin you. Sometimes the polarized
mind can even make the loss of your toothbrush into a betrayal by
God and drop you right down into feeling a state of deep separation!
And then of course there are the other, big losses that seem more
life shattering, and are very obviously energy draining. So it is
important to observe how the egoic mind plays tricks on your awareness
and sets you up to lose energy.
The Witness
It is important to develop a strong, neutral witness in this clearing
work. The witness is that part of you that is outside the ego-outside
the spin of negative and positive polarities. The stronger your ability
to be in the witness, observing life from the neutral place outside
of the ego, the better your ability to clear egoic shadow issues.
As you learn to identify more deeply with the witness, you will have
an ever-increasing ability to recognize all the facets of your egoic
programming. The witness is fully centered at all times and occupies
the middle ground between the extremes of negative and positive. Since
this is so, it recognizes that ego is involved when the intense fears
associated with loss come up. Likewise, it also recognizes that ego
is involved when the intense desires associated with gain come up.
It has a moderating, stabilizing and balancing influence on the ego's
dance between the fear of loss and the desire for gain.
A strong witness is most important when we work on patterns that involve
the issue of loss. When a situation arises that sparks excessive reactivity,
the witness can recognize it. The witness knows that excessive reactivity
to something means that childhood or infant issues are involved. You
might find yourself thinking, "Gosh, I'm a grownup person. Why
am I feeling like this?" The witness knows that doing the shadow-clearing
work involves slipping in and out of our infant issues constantly.
The Deprived Child
The ego's first programming with loss begins to be instituted in infancy.
Therefore in working with healing our patterns around loss, we must
be willing to go back in time and look at our childhoods and even
our infancies. Looking at the early programming around loss usually
reveals the presence of a deprived child who lives inside us even
when we are adults.
It is always important when working with a pattern to look at its
opposite. The deprived child can have a number of opposites. One of
them is a persona that takes the form of a greedy and power-hungry
go-getter. The third-dimensional world is largely run by this polarity.
The "black-hole" neediness of the deprived child and the
resulting "hungry-ghost" greediness that develops in the
adult are juxtaposed to form a very dominant personality structure.
The deprived child can grow up with other compensatory patterns too,
such as someone who sublimates his/her own neediness into finding
fulfillment in serving others in a codependent way-the rescuer or
the savior. In my observation there are four specific compensating
overlays to the deprived child: the needy victim, the greedy tyrant,
the withholding rebel, and the martyred savior. And each of these
overlays will differ slightly through being held in either a feminine
or masculine ego.
The neediness of the deprived child lends fire to the adult's compensatory
behaviors. The adult feels the need to fill up the inner emptiness
of loss and emotional deprivation through his/her own efforts. I call
the one who efforts "the doer"-someone with an aggressive,
driven quality which out-pictures as an often insatiable thirst to
be somebody in order to heal the nobody that the deprived child feels
itself to be.
This hungry quality can appear as extreme rapacious greed, dominating
and exploiting in its efforts to feel less like a loser, or it can
also be a desire to succeed in somewhat more modest ways without the
extreme abuse of power of the tyrant. The degree of compensating by
the adult persona is proportional to the degree of wounding experienced
by the deprived child.
One thing is robustly clear, the ambitious desire to fill oneself
with material success will always fail-material success may come but
it will not satisfy the inner neediness. The program of the deprived
child is a bottomless pit which can never be filled by the adult doer's
compensating efforts. Yet we just have to look at the seductive material
world around us to see that billions of people are deluded into believing
that it might. However, it is a program, like a computer program,
coded to give a result of emptiness. No matter how much material success
is poured into the black hole of neediness, it cannot and never will
feel fulfilled. Nothing short of the full healing of the inner deprived
child will allow the adult to find fulfillment.
The egoic programming of the human ego can be very easily likened
to a computer program. It can only do what it is programmed to do,
unlike our true Self, which has awareness directly plugged into the
unfathomable intelligence of universal mind. And because the deprived-child
program is designed to produce a result of emptiness and loss, then
that is what it produces. Indeed that is all it can produce. It can
never give a reading of fulfillment-leaving the hungry, greedy go-getter
forever attempting to override the "empty" program by creating
a "full" program, which is an act of futility. The only
solution is to see the empty and full programs as forming a polarity
in ego and to do the processing work to dissolve them.
Beyond
Loss and Gain Is Love
Love has the capacity to multiply itself. It has a mysterious component
in that it always multiplies itself, and it never divides. This is
an important thing to remember about love. Material things, when separated
from the component of love, have a way of dividing themselves. If
you cut an apple in half and give half away, your material eyes will
see that you have only half an apple left. Your material eyes are
the dual, physical eyes that choose to run things through the filters
of loss and gain.
But when you give love, whether the love takes the form of a generous
gift of material things, or of energy, such as prayer or plain old
goodwill, then that love multiplies, and the energy exchange does
not involve loss and gain. If you give away material things on a flow
of love, the material things will multiply, too. It is the love that
multiplies them.
If you are feeling love, even if it is just for five minutes in the
middle of some working day, stop and watch how all-encompassing it
is. It connects and contains. Send it out in the form of gratitude,
appreciation and wishes for others to receive the gift of the grace
that you are enjoying in that moment. Just let your heart create the
intention, and the love will do its work of multiplication.
When you suffer a loss, it is the relative mind that says, "This
wasn't supposed to happen. I don't deserve this." If instead,
you can find the heart and say, "God's grace gave me this experience,
and I accept it with an even mind," then the soul will take a
quantum leap forward.
When you choose to buy into loss, disappointment can take over and
ruin your day. Choosing not to buy into the loss allows you to see
life's grace gently guiding you through the necessary changes toward
truth, to seeing a bigger picture. As it happens, allow yourself to
understand that there is a lesson being given to you that will free
you. In that freedom you will find the grace to express gratitude
for the growth taking place in you.
This is how compassion is born in us. You can have compassion for
yourself, as you would for others, for the wounding and the losses
that you appear to have taken.
Decoding
the Loss Matrix
The training the first key offers us is this: to give up the notion
that we are locked into this little loss-gain reality and its ongoing
tragedy and suffering. There are brilliant, vast forces at work at
a soul level which are eternal and infinite. These forces are bringing
us through wondrous experiences that evolve us. They are not out to
harm us. They are only here to help us grow. And the experiences do
help us grow when we do not run them through the old programming of
loss and gain. The quality of our lives is defined by what we focus
on in each moment. Using this key will help us to focus moment to
moment on the big picture rather than on the small, limiting idea
of loss or gain.
By being alert and conscious of the mental ideas and beliefs that
arise in the mind, we can witness the mind creating the events of
our lives. We can use these moments of clarity to choose whether or
not to be in relativity-for example, relating to loss and gain.
If our witness catches the mind fearing loss on a mental or emotional
level, we will not necessarily have to learn the lesson of loss as
a physical experience by living it out in the world. By inquiring
into what the mind is doing, by immediately detaching from the fear
and by facing the unknown that the situation presents, we can discern
the lesson on the mental or emotional level, which is a quicker, less
painful way than having the issue manifest on a physical level.
Here is an example of how this works. I once worked with a woman who
asked me to help her process her fear of losing her friends. Her childhood
wounding was deep, and she complained that nobody liked her. She was
lonely and depressed because she would make friends and always lose
them. She knew she was somehow pushing them away, but could not fix
the problem. We looked at her fear of losing her friends and processed
the childhood wounding. Among other issues, we processed her neediness,
which grew out of a dysfunctional relationship with her mother. Her
deep desire for friends was so extreme that her newfound friends were
repulsed by the neediness and would leave shortly after meeting her.
With processing, it was not long before she cleared deep layers of
victim patterning and much of the compensatory behaviors associated
with it. Her neediness dissipated. As a result, she became less afraid
of losing friends. Her ability to witness her fear pattern strengthened.
She developed the ability to catch the fear in her mind in the moment
and not to buy into it. Now she has plenty of friends because she
deconstructed much of the childhood programming that caused her to
be so desperate and grasping. She learned the lesson at a mental-emotional
level through the processing, and so she does not have to live it
out anymore on a physical level by actually gaining and losing friends.
She is a much happier person now, her life is smoother, and she has
more equanimity and detachment.
Everybody, whether they are witnessing or not, whether they are on
an advanced spiritual path or not, is making choices in the mind,
in each moment. Even though our egos run the programming of loss,
there is always an opportunity in every moment to choose not to buy
into it. And that is the process of ascension-not buying into the
programming.
Letting
Go of Loss
Often we come up against some barriers in consciousness where parts
of the ego just cannot let go. The ego simply will not release the
losses that we believe we have taken in our life. The ego has made
the losses a big deal or has found a pay off in some way. There is
something we get from holding onto them, some way in which life reciprocates
our sense of loss and deprivation. Everything is in the eye of the
perceiver, however. We can choose to perceive differently.
If the losses have programmed the ego to feel inadequate, worthless,
useless, or deprived, or have somehow robbed you of your dignity,
it is very hard to let go of the negative image of yourself. There
is also the positive side, though. This is where you feel self-importance
and work really hard at trying to build self-esteem and confidence
to help you feel good about yourself. It is important to remember
that this positive side is all just ego, too. Old stories you have
woven around losses and gains are all just aspects of the false personality,
the false you. Dissolution is possible if you are willing to take
a look at both the negative and the positive images that you hold
about yourself and to realize that it is all egoic programming, not
who you really are as eternal beingness.
Start by doing some in-depth exploring. Ask yourself, "What is
this negative image I have of myself? What is the positive one?"
Look at both of them and write about them in your journal. If you
cannot see the negative one, delineate the positive one, because it
will be the logical opposite.
Situations in life will trigger feelings of inadequacy, insecurity
or inferiority, which are basically feelings of loss. Even though
something outside you may trigger the program holding those feelings,
it is not the outside doing it to you. Never ever! It is coming from
your inner programming of the deprived child.
Almost everyone feels useless, inferior and inadequate at least some
of the time. It is because that old vibratory field of the deprived
child is around your body all the time, as a miasma, a veil, even
when you are not focused on it. It may be mostly unconscious, while
its opposite, the positive side-superiority, for example- is mostly
in the conscious awareness. Then the inadequacy and the superiority
flip sides when something seemingly outside triggers a reaction.
It is important to try to define the vibratory fields associated with
egoic states that you hold around your body. If you can feel them
and give words to them in your journal, you are taking the first step
toward a major clearing.
For example, as you explore your feelings, you may find words like
incompetent, useless, insecure, shy, fearful and damaged. Then you
look for the antonyms of those words. For example: competent, useful,
secure, outgoing, courageous and healthy. As you make the lists of
opposites, it is important to remember that none of it is you. It
is not who you truly are as the Self. It is simply the programmed
personality. Even if you have held onto it for fifty years, you do
not have to for another fifty years.
Once you have felt the vibrations and witnessed them, you can say,
"I choose not to carry this field around with me." Because
you have found both the positive and negative sides of the ego, both
the conscious and the unconscious, you can offer up both sides to
Spirit in a prayer, releasing any attachment to both sides. As you
do this, you can consciously choose not to buy into or believe the
situation of loss that gave rise to the feelings. You may still have
the memory in your mind, but this process will help diffuse the memory
and take away the sting. In this way you can let the memory and the
miasma go. They are not you.
The
Ego Expands and Contracts with Loss and Gain
Usually there is an enormous fear in the ego of what is perceived
as emptiness, so much so that we would rather hold onto our negative
baggage than actually venture forth into our true, pristine state
of beingness. The reason is that we project the fear of emptiness
and of the void onto the true void of eternity because that is all
the ego knows. In our conditioned state, we do not know what the shining
void of eternity is, unless we have had an experience of it in meditation
or in some other context. The ego will fear it because it fears the
unknown.
It is the ego's program to fear the unknown, because it sees its death.
The ego fears its death. It would rather live in extreme states of
limitation and even negativity than give up its power and let go-which
means ego death. There is logic to that. When you are in a negative
state, the egoic consciousness contracts, and in that contracting
you find a feeling of security. In the comfort of contraction, you
know you exist. There is no danger of your flying off like a helium
balloon into outer space, which it sometimes feels could happen when
the anchoring of the ego begins to dissipate. As a result the ego
imagines and fears the helium balloon scenario.
The ego has the extremes of its negative side and its positive side,
based on expansion and contraction. When it is negative, it contracts.
It contracts to make itself dense and heavy, and that grounds it.
If it contracts too much, then you start feeling so dense that it
becomes unbearable. So there is a lower limit to how much contraction
the egoic programming will allow before it turns into its opposite.
The energy moves in a figure eight. You go down into the negative,
and when you hit the bottom extreme, you create a ray of hope, which
moves it in the direction of expansion. Then up it goes and begins
to expand again. Then the fear of floating off into the void comes
in, and you will create a doubt, which institutes a contraction. This
is the way the ego works, continuously cycling around, expanding and
contracting.
Beyond the ego is simply beingness-changeless, eternal, complete,
full and luminous. To experience this beingness, we must release some
of the ego's ballast. Ballast is a shipping term which means to weight
down and stabilize. When a boat goes out to sea with no cargo, it
will take on water just to keep it weighted down. Normally the cargo
keeps the ship steady and weighted down in the water, but if the ship
is too light, it bobs too much and can capsize. Like ships, we use
our negative states to weight ourselves down and to stabilize. The
ego believes it can become unstable, and of course, beliefs fulfill
themselves.
So the egoic expansion and contraction can become unstable. But the
real you, the perceiver, the eternal I, can never be unstable. Nothing
can destabilize that. It is perfectly formed in what it is. It cannot
change. It cannot lose anything, and it cannot gain anything. It has
and is everything. Nothing can be added to it, and nothing can be
taken away.
It is not possible to let go of all the ballast at once. It takes
time. When you make a choice to let go of some of your ballast, there
has to be a period of rewiring. The subtle meridians and all the circuits
of the body get reconfigured in such a way that allows you to be able
to hold the clear light of reality and you will find yourself evolving
into a new state. The clear light of reality, the sense of stability
and the permanent, changeless state of beingness, must be wired into
the subtle bodies gradually, so that this cycling around the figure
eight is minimal.
In the beginning it is the daily experience of the cycling ego that
dominates our awareness, and as we make the choices to wake up to
that and to see the truth, the amount of our attention that is caught
in that figure eight diminishes. More of our attention will be held
in the clear perceiver, and this is the process that happens within
time.
So letting go of the idea of loss is first. We get it on a mental
level first because mental energy is quick; it grasps things. Second
is the emotional letting go, which is more challenging. Those vibratory
fields that are our emotional states, which we hold in and around
the body-feelings of confusion, disappointment, dissatisfaction, and
despair, to name a few-are states that give us ballast. Remember to
witness them, and remember that you will not float into space if you
dump your negative emotional baggage.
As you let go of the negativity, the cargo you take on is love. I
suggest that you dedicate 365 days a year to remembering love. Never
let a single day go by that you do not think of and honor your own
ability to love and give love. Try each day to consciously make a
point of expressing that love, feeling it inside yourself and expressing
it in some way to somebody. If you can do that daily, then you will
find you can do it the rest of your life. And you will be very happy.
That is the key to happiness.
A
Process
The following egoic clearing technique is called "polarity processing"
and is explained in more detail in the book, The Marriage of Spirit-Enlightened
Living in Today's World.
Write a story in your journal about an experience of loss. Be sure
to include all your feelings about it. Don't economize with the paper.
Be as thorough as you possibly can. Include things like: How do you
fear loss? Is there any payoff in experiencing loss? How and why might
you attract loss? How do you try to avoid loss? Go back through the
story and circle all the descriptive words and phrases-adjectives,
adverbs, anything with a charge to it. Make a list of all those circled
words and phrases down the left-hand column of a page. Then in the
right-hand column, write the opposites. These two lists are the polarities
that comprise the ego, that lock you into attractions and repulsions
and that keep you stuck in the limitation and duality of the separate
system. Make an offering of the list and give it all back to Spirit.
Let it all go, knowing none of it is who you truly are. You are eternity.
In a meditation, release it, do not believe in the loss or the gain,
try instead to feel love and compassion and try to feel the movement
of energy into the third eye.
A
Prayer
Oh Eternity, please take all of these states of mind which are unbalanced
in this pattern and balance and clear them. Do this so that I may
see more clearly and find my way home more easily. I offer up the
egoic belief in loss and gain, and I ask to live more in love, compassion
and unity consciousness. I give thanks knowing this work will be done.
A Meditation
Sit comfortably. Take five or seven deep breaths until your breathing
becomes calm and deep. Now visualize the core as it is situated along
the central axis of the body. It looks rather like a luminous fluorescent
tube running down the center of your subtle body. In the physical
body it corresponds more or less to the spine but sits slightly in
front of it. By visualizing it, you begin to feel its presence.
Imagine that you, as your essential Self, are the core. Think of how
we write the letter "I", a straight vertical column. It
means us-who we are. The letter "I", describing who we are,
comes from the shape of the core. It is the most powerful energy meridian
in all the bodies, and it is actually the "I". It is where
the presence of the "I am-ness" is situated in us. At the
same time it is also situated at the very center of the cosmos. It
is not to be confused with the "I am something in particular,"
such as "I am a loser," "I am an artist," or "I
am tall with brown eyes."
Sit with your attention on the core, holding center and feel your
"I am-ness" for awhile.
This
is an excerpt from Returning to Oneness The Seven Keys of Ascension
