There is nothing about any level of consciousness that is right or wrong, good or bad, pure or evil. You should feel free to let your consciousness touch on any of the seven levels. You are where you are — here and now. Your growth in Living Love will depend on completely accepting yourself and others — right here now — and not in some future time when you have conquered your addictions.
Just accept where you are now by realizing that you are experiencing addictions that give you the feelings you need for your next step in growth. By joyously using your here and now as a stepping stone, your growth will be happening in the fastest possible way.
Here is the Living Love scale you can use to develop a moment-by-moment feeling of where you are in your great adventure into higher consciousness:
What is it that makes you feel secure? What is it that makes you feel insecure? Your answer to these questions is probably misleading to you, for your feelings of security are created by your emotional programming — what you are telling yourself inside. The outside conditions of your life do not make you feel either secure or insecure. They only trigger your inside programming. One person may feel secure with practically no money at all. Another may feel insecure with a million dollars in the bank.
The Security Center automatically triggers feelings of fear and anxiety when the outside world does not conform to your security programming. Observe how much of your time is involved in an unpleasant striving to achieve the conditions that you tell yourself you must have to feel secure. The Security Center of Consciousness is very demanding and strongly pulls your consciousness away from the higher Centers.
You will escape being trapped in this first level of consciousness when you begin to understand that your feelings of security or insecurity are due to your emotional programming which you picked up from addicted people before you were mentally and physically mature. You will also notice the impossibility of getting enough of whatever it is that you equate with security. You may be like the rat who is running as fast as he can in a revolving cartwheel cage. There is no way to get there by running faster — or by achieving more efficiently.
Paradoxically, you would probably be safer if you never again experienced fear in your life — unless you were actually trapped in a jungle situation faced with the need for immediate fight or flight on a physical level. You will be far safer when consciousness replaces the emotional response of fear. For example, if you wish to cross a busy street, you increase the probability of being hurt if you are afraid of being hit by speeding automobiles. You will be safest if you are simply conscious of the automobiles running back and forth and calmly wait on the curb until there is a break in the traffic. When you perceive this break, without the slightest experience of fear, paranoia, or danger, you calmly and peacefully walk across the street. If you were totally unconscious of what happens when an automobile hits you (as a small child is), fear would be helpful to make you more aware of the overall situation. But once you are old enough to be conscious of the various factors involved in a life situation, a fear response makes you more jumpy and less perceptive, it uses up your energy by making you tense and it keeps you from enjoying your here and now.
It is interesting to note that most of the time in your present adult life, the experiences of insecurity and fear are usually associated with the futuring of your rational mind. You will be apprehensive and worried about what may happen next. You tend to forget that in all of the situations that you went through last year, you were, in the here and now, able to handle them in one way or another. If you look back over all of the threats of the past year, you may be able to develop the understanding that you did not need fear or feelings of insecurity to produce the optimal response to each situation in the here and now of your life. In fact, all of the fear and worrying that you did simply wasted your energy and potential for happiness. Some of us manage to kill almost all of our enjoyment of the present by worrying about the future. If there is something you need to do to make you more secure in the future, then you get busy and do it. That’s here-and-now action. But if there is nothing you can do, the game is to let it go from the screen of your consciousness. Tell yourself that if the problem comes up as a here-and-now reality, you will have the energy, perceptiveness and loving help that you need to respond to it optimally. If you work on reprogramming your security addictions by using the Living Love Methods, you may be able to become sufficiently conscious so that you will never again experience fear in your life. This is the beginning of freedom.
The Security Center is such a lonely level of consciousness! When your consciousness is preoccupied with striving toward what you feel to be your security needs, you are more isolated from people than on any other level. And your energy will be at its lowest. When you are preoccupied with security, you trap yourself in subject-object relationships with others. You create others as objects to help you become more secure — or as objects to fight because they threaten your security. On the security level you cannot love others since this level creates great distances between you and other people. If your consciousness is imprisoned on the security level, you may sleep from nine to twelve hours a day and still complain of being tired. When you are no longer hung up on the Security Center of Consciousness, you may sleep less than six hours a day and feel energetic and refreshed.
You transcend the security level by developing a deeper and deeper understanding of how your hunger for security is all a matter of your emotional programming. It is a trip that you are doing on your own head. Your feelings of insecurity are not a necessary consequence of people, things and circumstances around you. You will begin to realize that your life right now is what it is. And if you eliminate your addictive models of how things should be, you always have enough to feel good right here and right now.
If you prefer to make changes in your life, you can make them far more effectively when you transcend the addictive programming that makes you feel insecure. When your consciousness begins to operate more and more in the Love Center and Cornucopia Center, your higher consciousness will enable you to flow into situations that offer you far more real security than your lower-consciousness struggle for security will ever provide. For real security lies only in the love and flowing that you will discover through higher consciousness. It can never be found in manipulating the world of people and things around you.
A person who is hung up on the Security Center of Consciousness tells himself, I can be happy if I can just feel secure. However, once he begins to feel more secure, he finds that this is not quite true. He then feels that if he can arrange the people and things in his life to provide a constantly varied pattern of beautiful sensations, he will be happy.
If you are like many people, sex may be your most sought-after sensation. Your life style may be designed to provide you with sexual sensations. The people you choose to be with, the clothes you buy, the home you live in and the style of speech, thinking and action that you have developed will tend to be determined by whatever you calculate will make you appeal to the sexual partners you most desire. This is known as subject-object sex in which you are the subject and treat others in your life as sexual objects.
There is nothing wrong with doing this except that you are operating on a level of consciousness that cannot provide happiness. For sex is never enough. You are tuning in to only a small part of yourself — and even a smaller part of others. They are not responding to you as a whole person and you are not responding to them as a whole person. Behind the exquisite sexual dance, both of you really feel the shallowness of the subject-object relationship. You know something is wrong, even though you don’t know exactly what it is. Because no matter how many terrific sexual orgasms you may have, they are never enough. Even if you could reach sexual climaxes a dozen times a day, life would still seem hollow. For this second level of consciousness can only produce flashes of pleasure and long periods of indifference and boredom.
Sensations, however, pleasant, can never make you happy if you are depending on them for happiness. You become driven, thwarted, sometimes satiated and not tuned in to the flow of the here and now when you are chasing sensation after sensation. But the same sensations can be totally enjoyed when your consciousness is no longer stuck on the second level. When your consciousness is primarily tuned to the Love Center or the Cornucopia Center, sensations can add to your happiness as a part of the here-and-now flow of your life.
Although sex is the sensation that many people are most heavily addicted to, it is by no means our only addiction on the Second Level. We tell ourselves that we can find happiness through the taste of food, the sounds of music, the experience of a special environment that we regard as our impressive home, the sensations of movies and plays, etc. The search for happiness through sensations keeps us ingeniously busy — but nothing is ever enough — until you are enough. When you are enough through higher consciousness, everything can be enjoyed as part of the great drama of your life Until then, nothing ever quite does it for you and the enjoyment you seek will tend to elude you as long as you addictively demand it. When you uplevel addictions into preferences, you enjoy it all.
When your consciousness is primarily directed toward providing you with the sensation patterns to which you are addicted, you will have more energy than when it was hung up on the Security Center of Consciousness. You will usually be with more people and you will need to sleep less. An individual who is hunting for sex is definitely generating more energy than a person who is worried about his security. In fact, one who is heavily addicted to the security level will probably have dropped off to sleep during the early part of the evening. Thus the search for happiness through sensations is definitely an improvement over the search for happiness on the Security Center of Consciousness. But wisdom, peace and serenity are not yet in sight.
The last of the lower Centers of Consciousness (that can never provide you with enough) is the Power Center. Most of the people in the world are addicted to these three lower Centers — the Security Center, the Sensation Center and the Power Center. The attempt to find happiness through the Power Center is definitely a forward step in growth toward higher consciousness. When you are operating from the Power Center, you will have more energy and you will interact with more people. But these will still be subject-object interactions in which people either cooperate with your power games or threaten them. In this Center, life is a series of competitive moves and countermoves.
What do you strive for on the Third Level of Consciousness? Is it money as a method of wielding power rather than money as a form of security? Is it prestige — because the more prestige you have, the more you can manipulate people? Do your power addictions keep you preoccupied with external symbols such as a mod car, an attractive home, fashionable clothes, etc? Or have you up-leveled the game to internal status symbols — such as knowledge and lots of hobbies so that others perceive you as an interesting, achieving person? Or perhaps sex has now become a power game whereby you enjoy sex not only for the sensations but also as a challenge to your Power Center. Do you seek the sexual partner who is hardest to attract because of the ego challenge?
Have you ever noticed that the people who are the most successful in the power game are simply living a hollow life with external evidences of worldly success — but without really winning inside in terms of peace, serenity and oneness with others? It often happens that the more successful a person becomes on the outside, the less successful he is on the inside. Anxiety, ulcers and heart disease tend to increase with external success.
To the degree that your moment-to-moment consciousness is biased by security, sensations and power, you are trapped in the lower consciousness folkways of our culture — and you are not finding enough in life to be happy. You are ready for your next step toward higher consciousness when you deeply realize the utter futility of trying to make it in life using these lower consciousness levels. This does not necessarily mean that you must drastically change your external activities. For what you renounce is your addictive demands and not necessarily the things you are doing. For example, it is not money or sex that causes unhappiness — it is your addictive demands for money or sex. It is the clanging of the emotion-backed circuits in your biocomputer that keeps you disappointed, frustrated and suffering if the happenings outside you do not exactly correspond to your inside programs. Thus you do not renounce your worldly activities — for it’s all here for you to enjoy. You renounce your emotion-backed demands which keep you from enjoying the bountiful life that has always been available around you.
It is easy to see the more obvious power games involving money, political power, status symbols, people bossing each other around, etc. But it is helpful to be aware of the more subtle power games we play. For instance, it is clear that someone talking in a loud voice may be trying to control people, but a power game may also be present when someone talks in an unusually soft voice that makes people be quiet and listen hard if they are to hear. Someone who is constantly ordering people around and who forcefully insists that people accept his or her opinion can be coming from the Power Center. However, someone who is always quiet can be subtly manipulating by his or her sweet acceptance and you-always-know-best attitude. This type of subtle manipulation makes one put energy into extracting what someone else really wants. This game creates a subject-object type of separateness. We might ask ourselves, What do I do to get what I want? What masks do I wear? What part in the drama do I play?
You have hundreds of things in your head that you are now protecting as a part of your personal boundaries and social position. You will grow in happiness as you gradually realize that all of this stuff is not who you really are. It’s just ego-backed programming that you picked up on your way to where you are now. Your energy will enormously increase and your sleep needs decrease as you give up guarding the various manifestations of your security, sensation and power addictions.
One of the bonuses of higher consciousness is that when you give it all up, you get it all back. What you give up are your inner addictive demands — what you get back is more of everything than you need in order to be happy. As you grow into the Fourth Center of Consciousness, you will find that you have all the power you need in your life — in fact you will have more than you need. For your unconditional acceptance of everyone around you will open doors that you could never have opened when you operated from the Third Center of Consciousness.
When you approach life with power addictions, you will be instantly resisted by the power addictions of other people. Instead of opening themselves to help you get what you want, they close themselves and are automatically antagonistic to your power thrusts which threaten them. As you grow into the higher Centers of Consciousness, you will begin to experience an effectiveness that you could never attain when you were shoving from the Third Center, trying to bulldoze life into giving you what you thought you needed for happiness.
| Centers | Associated Emotions | Why the three centers off a yo-yo type of enjoyment of life |
|---|---|---|
| 1 - SECURITY | Fear, worry, anxiety, etc. |
|
| 2 - SENSATION | Disappointment, frustration, boredom, etc. |
|
| 3 - POWER | Anger, resentment, irritation, hostility, hate, etc. |
|
Some of the most dramatic performances of your ego and your rational mind will be triggered at the Power Center of Consciousness. Some methods of consciousness growth treat the ego and rational mind as enemies to be destroyed. In the Living Love Way, we regard the ego and the rational mind as friends that are really there to help us — but they can be like ignorant friends who hurt us as often as they help us. Helpfulness requires both skill and understanding. Our egos and rational minds are often like the well-meaning neighbor who sees his friend lying in the street with a broken spine after being hit by a car. When he picks him up to take him to the hospital, the broken spine crushes the spinal nerves so that his friend will never walk again. In trying to help, the neighbor ignorantly damages his friend. Similarly, when our egos and rational minds use lower consciousness programming, they continually keep our lives from working in ways that produce optimal enjoyment.
The Living Love Way does not try to kill your ego or your rational mind. Since they are our friends that would like to help us, we engage them to help us root out our addictions and uplevel them to preferences. We realize that our egos trigger a feeling of uneasiness when the outside world does not fit our addictive models of how it all should be. They also give us a flush of pleasure when the outside world does fit our addictions. In either case, we need our egos to give us the emotional experiences that enable us to become aware of our addictive demands — and to understand the heavy price that we pay for all of them sooner or later if they are not reprogrammed into preferences.
The goal is not to kill your ego — but to retire it due to lack of work. If you killed your ego, you might retreat into a schizoid-type shell that would keep you from enjoying the beautiful things life offers you. Your ego has a vital part to play in revealing to you the addictions you have yet to work on. When you reprogram your addictions, your ego will automatically stop triggering negative emotions that interfere with your happiness. So welcome your ego, watch its operation and use it as a necessary part of you that will give you the experiences you need in order to grow into higher consciousness.
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