In my last post I discussed the concept of OnCore or Integral relationships. In order to have on OnCore relationship, at least one partner must be aware and living an on core Life 3.0. For both partners to be in that frame of mind is a bonus, but more often than not, people and relationships are at different levels of consciousness. And we are all at different levels each day and in each area of our lives.
Yesterday I was asked “What is consciousness?” The only answer I can provide is that it is what a Supreme Court justice once said about pornography “you know it when you see it.” One of the key traits of consciousness is living in the moment and bringing awareness to authentic facts as we know them. As Eckhart Tolle has taught me “I have form”, “I am a male,” “I am breathing,” etc…
In the process of preparing my next tele-class series on relationships, one of the books that I am reading about identified 40 or so traits that “society” almost universally assigns to either the male or female gender roles. The book also has the reader complete their own personal survey in which I found that internally I personally identify with more feminine traits than traditionally male traits, examples include being talkative, superstitious, compassionate, and sometimes submissive. However externally I identified overwhelmingly more with the typical masculine traits such as being aggressive, assertive, and dominant. I wonder how common this is for men in general?
In my personal relationships, I have often shown these inferior (personally inferior, not collectively) traits in addition to my public persona. Carl Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychoanalysis, referred to these interior traits as the Anima or Animas, the internal masculine or feminine within us. He also said that ” One cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in importance in the morning will be of little importance in the evening and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” Jung believed that as we age, each person’s task in life is to integrate these inferior traits into the greater whole, in order to become fully integrated or complete, or as we call it now, Integral or OnCore.
As I shared in a recent post regarding the disposability of men, I believe a society (or the masculine mindset of that society) that continues to force one gender (itself) to live in a subset of gender roles is reinforcing that disposability factor. This mindset inhibits males from becoming balanced. I personally know of two retired males that could no longer stand living and so they stopped, rather dramatically.
The book that I’m reading is written for men who want to become Integral. It teaches that we should not show the emerging softer side of ourselves to our spouses because this would confuse them and possibly frustrate them. This is particularly true if their spouses are in their fifties and finally beginning to live a more independent life. It is suggested that these spouse don’t want to be burdened by a needy husband getting in touch with the interior inferior side of his persona. But this makes me question, if we cannot authentically be ourselves that inter-spousal intimate relationships – then where exactly can we explore and embrace this new understanding? I think perhaps it is not truly a question whether we should be authentic but rather the issue relates to in what manner we are authentic. Specifically, there are many ways of embracing the traits that have been here to fore interior, to explore them fully, openly and authentically, to share this journey with our spouses, without becoming (or making them become) psychotic. We are, after all, talking about living an Integral life not one of incapacitation.
Bruce Lipton, in his landmark best-selling book “Biology of Belief“, laid out exactly how we become socialized and programmed in the first five years of life. In my own case, as I shared a few blogs ago, my mother was dramatically impacted by the death of her great aunt. This stamp on her character, in turn, permeated how she raised me. This created in me a need for balance in my “personal software” that was scripted unintentionally by my mother. The same is true for all of us, we are all shaped and molded by our parents beliefs and experiences. We become who we are through a process of learning (often subconsciously) how they see us.
Fortunately for me, in the back of the book, Bruce shares how we can reprogram ourselves. This process is actually how he became able to write the book in the first place. Several years ago when speaking at a conference, Bruce was followed by Rob Williams. Around that time, Rob had invented a process called PSYCH-K(R). PSYCH-K(R) allows us to put our brain into a whole brain state and simulate the brain state that was present when we were young and very easily programmed. After the age of about five, brain changes in elasticity alters our learning patterns so that after that point and as we age, we are no longer so easily programed. To complicate matters, most of us don’t remember much of what we were told before the age of five. However the supercomputer inside the brain, our subconscious mind, remembers everything and it is our unconscious or subconscious programming that will often determine how we how we make decisions or respond others.
Last year my spouse and I both attended the basic and advanced PSYCH-K workshops. While there I experienced clarity and was able to discover and effect the necessary change in several areas of my own “software”. I identified that my mother’s distrust of men was projected as a child onto me, creating in me the need to trust myself as a male. Another small change I needed to make was to cultivate acceptance of the fact that it is “okay” for me to enter into a profession which draws on the compassionate intuitive side of my persona. To be clear, I accepted my mother a long time ago and harbor no deep seeded resentment against her. I know that she did a good job however, there were just some things that were provided “free with purchase.”
Two profoundly altering yet simple statements came out of this processes in a less than four hour session. By contrast, I have spent time with three therapists over the years at various times of my life. In those years of therapy, I gained knowledge but no interior change. I now know this is because that subconscious super computer in the brain works many, many times faster than our conscious minds. This is why affirmations do not work. Affirmations combined with years of mediation and discipline will, for some, eventual help shift our understanding. Yet in just four hours on a Sunday morning last January, I eliminated most of the issues that I’ve had my whole life. Since then, I’ve been able to get on with being an authentic integrated whole person.
Being OnCore, integrated and Integral are actually very easy. We simply have to want to do it. We have to want to grow. Wisdom is easily acknowledged and accepted if we have the courage to face ourselves, to understand our demons and to move past them. Clearly until now, for our society this has been the road less traveled. On a cold wintry day last January, that wasn’t dark and stormy but sunny and clear, I made the choice to take the load road less traveled, and it has made all the difference. You can do this too.
You can attend a PSYCH-K retreat or you can hire a coach who is trained in the techniques. I also discovered that PSYCH-K and Breakthrough Laser coaching (an iPEC coaching technique) are “kissin’ cousins”. As a coach, I have integrated these tools into a cohesive practice designed to help you identify and get past the subconscious obstacles holding you back so that you can get on with living the life you born to live…at last.