The Longest Journey I Ever Took Was from My Head to My Heart. (Part 1)

Human beings experiment extensively with what points directly and specifically to decision-making in life — with much trial and error.

A great decision can change the course of your life in an instant, but so can a bad one.

Is there such a thing as a bad decision or is everything already pre-ordained, programmed and on a choice-less destiny track? What are the signposts or clues? What would be the foundation and criteria for such an assertion? As life happens, do we truly have choice? Really?

As the new-age gurus or pseudo religions East and West claim, can we choose our path, our parents and our direction in life? And when? As we go or before we are born? Not very scientific by any means but interesting to ponder.

Are there answers to the riddle of existence and the endless suffering of mankind from all the manifestations imaginable? Is it worth thinking about or tackling?

My wife Amy and I met in 2014. It was radical and timely, extending way beyond the reality that people accept through the mind’s eye. We called our meeting a “quantum design connection” into a new reality and quality of experience unknown to us both prior to meeting. This kind of quantum does not happen every day!

We started asking questions

Can anyone really be authentic? Happy? Themselves? What is suffering? Violence? Can you stop it? Through what means? Religion? Become a Buddhist? An atheist? Move to India? Deny or repress it all and bathe calmly in total ignorance? Use a ton of drugs? Wait for the after-life? Faith can be beautiful but not a science either and if you have to wait for the after-life to be happy at last, what is it really saying about this life — your life?

Why is it important to deal with our false-self or shadow-self? Is there a difference between our persistent arguing ego “the voice in our heads” and our fearful self?

Nobody can see with clarity as long as one is subject to rigid dogmas, prejudice, restless and unconscious fears, mistrust, doubt, confusion, anxiety, insecurities, blind ignorance or a quasi total lack of education and real information.

We love this line from the Chinese I Ching: “Fire and water never mingle and it is the same with enlightenment and worry.” Can you really stop your mind from worrying, over-thinking, planning, measuring and comparing? Good questions? Can you? Isn’t worry a form of fear?

Put in its proper context and to extend a premise, life is made up of decisions, which take us either toward our true destiny and potential or take us speedily and with much adversity, pain and resistance, away from it.

From our newly discovered and combined perspectives, we began an extraordinary journey and daily investigations into the very fabric of our experience both mentally and emotionally.

If knowledge is power, is self-knowledge the greatest power?

Life empowered us with time, lots of it; finding efficient ways of making a living so we could muse and reflect freely thus, refocusing our energies toward understanding and sharing rather than survival and accumulating more material wealth.

We both concluded that a successful and satisfying life cannot be generated nor can it manifest fully without our unique power of authority, i.e. our personal and unique power over our choices and decisions.

However, it was neither mental power nor mental decisions and was not fear-based either.

Our investigation led us to the idea of self-image

Within our Western understanding of the world, self-image is at the heart of our decision process. When psychological or emotional suffering is experienced, there is always a self-image involved. Physical pain does not enter this realm.

A self-image is imagined and projected by the mind, it is our way of protecting ourselves from the world, from pain and a way (we all think) to assert or defend our individuality — our identity. Any good therapist out there will tell you that you need a good self-image or a healthy ego to navigate life successfully.

Needless to say we all have an I. “I” becomes an object of my comfort or of my suffering and vice-versa. “I” (me, who I think I am, my identity, my ego-self) suffers from something and therefore, objectifies that suffering by making it personal.

Here are chronic examples: not being good enough, needing to feel important, being fearful of tomorrow, needing someone’s love, seeing something wrong with the way life is, not fitting in, needing control, being or feeling like a victim, lack, fear of rejection, questioning your self-worth, etc., they all have a deep connection to the presence of a self-image.

We see ourselves as objects located in time and space and observing life “outside” of ourselves and always in relationship to this “I”, which represents the “inside” or inner self. We play the observer and the observed in a perpetual and dualistic dance of opposites. We subconsciously project ideas of ourselves (our “I’s”) while forgetting the source of it: the mind — who we think WE THINK we are.

For instance, if you say you are a Christian, it must have an identity (an “I”) in relationship to other identities to prove valid. The Jew, atheist or Muslim feels exactly the same way. We know that we are something because we can compare it to something else and reject its binary. In all cases it is a “projected “I”dentity.

Every time we use or refer to “I”, it becomes a self-image or more specifically an idea of myself: what I think or imagine I am — the manifestation of my identity in the world. We commonly refer to it as our ego or ego-self as mentioned above.

Paradoxically, it is in our view a great source of any form of vanity. What is the connection? Well, the dilemma with a self-image is that not only is it “not real” but that while we project an image of self out of habit, our true self is buried under the rubbles this false self has created out of its insecurities, fears and projected threats. In addition, a self-image needs protection but what we are protecting is not real, hence the vanity.

I appear as a separate self because I am identified with matter: body, sound, sight, feelings, sensations, other people’s reactions, circumstances, events, but also hopes, desires, wishes, wants, opinions, beliefs, political views, morals, etc. Within more informed popular culture it is often referred to as the “illusion of a separate self”.

In our context, self is not personal. Clearly not a new thought, but that self is not “personal” opens up the probability that it is not an identity assigned to a specific you, it can be very freeing to grasp.

Not only is it not personal but we are not responsible for it either. Controversial idea? You bet! In this non-personal “I” or “me”, we are free from the perspective of life itself having imposed its cruel rules. Life is seen as a phenomena but not happening to a “me”. For example, if you are born a Jew, a Muslin, Hindu or a Christian, did you choose that?

If I only experience myself as a conditioned organism locked-up in that object-subject appreciation of life through this “I”, I am a “conscious” being but my experiences are limited to those of my conditioning. “I” believes in God, “I” owns real estate, “I” has feelings, “I” has opinions and political views, “I” does things, “I” has a name, a family, a place of birth, a favorite sport, etc.

“I” gets scared of losing that self-made sense of self, which constantly monitors and processes through thinking and emotional internalization. Even emotions are personalized, dramatized and, more importantly, they are organized to make us feel responsible for them. Past and future are in a constant bad marriage ruled by the self-images created by the mind. It sounds deep and complex yet it is ultimately simple i.e. “who you think you are is not who you are”. There’s a Köan!

Let’s begin with how the stage is set for losing our intrinsic dignity and our sense of true-self.

Giving our power away is a rampant and disempowering phenomena that started way back in childhood where, out of innocence, habit, force and ignorance, we began to give away pieces of ourselves to parents, siblings, teachers, friends, lovers, institutions, religion, pressures, fears, you name it, in order to fit in, avoid conflict or abuse, feel worthy, compete with the world, move ahead or simply cope.

Selling or giving away our power of choice is so deeply ingrained that it is often only decades later that we realize its effects on our lives; if it is on our fractal line at all to be so lucky to realize it. The amount of personal and cultural denial is staggering.

Shamanism is a perfect metaphor to illustrate loss of power. A Shaman, through the help of animal spirits, works with you to take back the parts of yourself that have been scattered away through conditioning and left you feeling out of balance, disconnected, empty or emotionally, psychically, physically and spiritually depleted.

What is conditioning or homogenized thinking?

Let’s use some excerpts from people we have met on our journey and hear their side of the story of conditioned mind.

“Logic and reason have always been the ways of life, but feelings and emotions are what define and determine the “human experiential way” and therefore, logic and reason could never be enough and are pale compared to the movement of emotions.

The emotional nervousness and mental pressure of the mind of any human being can be concretized into nothing more than a seemingly reasonable question that can never be satisfied with any conclusive answer, about anything, because it never asks “what is”, but always asks “what could be” or worse “what should be.” Alokanand Diaz

“Why”, “what’s wrong” and “what should be” are at the heart of the false-self emergence or that which generates the many self-images of our false identities. “What “could be” and “what is” are always as far from each other as now is from 1000 years into the future.

Worth pondering over? Can we escape it? We see conditioning as having two faces, frameworks or structures. On one side, there is unnatural or false conditioning, which is a conditioning where we enter (or stay) in relationships, jobs and situations with the “covert” understanding that our power of choice and authority has to be given away in exchange for love, a paycheck or a promise or hope of a better life, security or success.

Early in life, we learn to think in a “have to” reality.

School or seeking approval are great examples. Also, we can mention the love from a parent who is not willing or able to give it. Naturally, most of it is unconscious as we blindly rationalize these popular well-accepted bargains.

From that viewpoint, emotional bribery or peer pressures come to mind as examples. After all, what choice do we have? The program is in place as we enter the world and start breathing air.

All types of distortions and insincere pathos develop, not to mention distress and suffering; we are told to buckle up or to swallow our pride, our feelings, and that nothing in life is delivered on a silver platter or that if you want something in this world, you better go and get it yourself with all your might.

So we all get caught here mentally from a very early age. This constant pressure to fit in, wanting to be loved, appreciated, cared for, successful, wanting to be needed, wanting to understand, wanting, wanting, all of the things we think we need. Nobody escapes that — we might adapt to it and cover it up nicely but there is no real freedom of mind in that nor liberation. After all, adaptation is not liberation.

On the other side, there is natural conditioning. That is all forms of learning, testing, repetition and experimenting where our personal will and decision-making power are not being exploited, corrupted or denied.

Relationships and situations are entered into with power and grace.

A classic example would be Michael Jordan entering basketball without giving away a piece of his soul. Situations are entered without mental pressures as we are being “asked or invited” to see if there is energy or clarity to enter this or that situation, relationship, life path, trip, marriage, career, etc.

In part 2, I will explore dual consciousness and how it emerged around the time of the French and American revolutions.

Philippe Stonebeck