無 / 有 – Sungwon Peter Choe Online

Guide to Growth: Introducing the Whole Self

(2010/1/6 note: the Whole Self is not a good name for this visualization technique. I need to rewrite it.)

Why Is This Still Happening To Me?

In a previous article, I talked about the need to develop a new perspective in order to move beyond your current set of experiences and enjoy a new reality. Easier said than done, right? In this article, I’ll introduce a belief system that acts as a powerful spiritual guide for your own development, enabling you to continuously develop through new perspectives and personal realities.

Individual and Environment

There is a mutually influential feedback loop between an individual and her environment (see Individual and Socio-Cultural Environment in Synergy). The structure of the socio-cultural environment provides a set of beliefs and values (the culture) that shape the thoughts and feelings of an individual. The thoughts and feelings of an individual causes her to take action in her environment, effecting change within it and so on.

The individual shapes the environment and vice versa.

Which of these has the more powerful influence on the other, the individual or her environment? Most of us adopt the belief that we are victims of circumstance, shaped and shat upon by our environment. The question “Why is this happening to me” itself takes this stance; that one is powerless in the face of the overwhelming reality of one’s socio-economic circumstances, looks, skills or just plain luck. So, what can you do to change your life with this belief? Not very much. Wait to be “discovered”. Play the lottery. Hope your boss will give you a raise. Hope that girl over there makes eye contact with you. Good luck with that.

Complete Responsibility

Now, the opposite belief of being a victim of circumstance is that you are in control. You effect change in your environment. Take this to the extreme: You are completely responsible for everything you experience. Yeah. Everything. It is an incredibly empowering belief. Imagine, if you have created your entire meaningless and pitiful existence, then you have the power to create an entirely new, meaningful and exhilarating existence. Your life can be a work of beauty, with you as the artist. (This belief system also has the added benefit that it seems to be closest to the truth.)

There are also dark and difficult implications of this belief system, however. How can you be responsible if you are a victim of war, rape, torture? I’ve struggled to understand this and I’m afraid I have found no satisfying answer. But intuitively I believe that everything, every horrible thing imaginable, has a place in the Kosmos, otherwise it would not exist. Allowing the universe its dark mysteries, we employ this belief system not to blame victims, but to empower them to move beyond victimhood.

Everything has a place in the Kosmos, maybe even you!

Beliefs

So we are completely responsible for our reality. But what are our tools? How do we shape our brave new world? The same way we created our current reality: with our thoughts and beliefs. Our beliefs are the single most powerful way we understand reality. We literally cannot perceive anything that does not exist within our belief systems. Another way to look at it is that we create our reality through our beliefs. (For more on how are beliefs shape our reality, see The Nature of Personal Reality)

You’re lazy because you believe you are lazy. You’re a night person because you believe you’re a night person. You’re fat because you believe you’re fat. You’re not creative because you believe you’re not creative. You’re sick because you believe you’re sick. And so on. Then to grow, we Just need to throw out limiting beliefs and adopt empowering ones. It really is that simple. But it’s not always so easy, is it?

Present Reality Reinforces Old Beliefs

Any self-development program or deep practice you embark on starts with the belief that you can grow or change. But then, after a few weeks you’re off your diet, back to your smokes, your daily dream journal gathering dust, whatever it is. Why does this always happen, huh? Because your environment provides more negative reinforcement than the power of positive thinking that got you started. And you believe more in your environment and your limiting beliefs than your empowering ones.

Your current reality is continually reinforced by your environment (it’s hard to Think and Grow Rich when you’re surrounded by reminders of your poverty), your friends and family (they have expectations of you to be consistent with your past behavior), and most of all your own patterns of thoughts and beliefs.

Two Months

Actor Vincent Regan (the Captain) during his 1st week of training for 300 at Gym Jones

As a friend in the pick-up community once related to me, it takes two months of practice or work (on your mind or body) before you see results. So the body and mind you have now is the result of what you were doing two months ago. Conversely, whatever you are doing now shapes who you’ll be in a couple months.

Vincent after 8 weeks of training for 300 at Gym Jones

Identity-Level Change

Have you ever worked on changing yourself or starting a new practice for more than two months? When you do, you start to identify with your new practice, it becomes part of you. After more than two years of training, I now strongly identify myself with the martial art that I do, Gicheonmun. I invariably mention it when new acquaintances ask about my work and play. This identification keeps me strongly motivated to continue training at least a few times a week, even when I’d rather just sit on my ass.

Your Whole Self

Now wouldn’t it be great if you could harness the motivation of identity-level change before you’d even changed? Why yes, yes it would. This is exactly what creating the belief in your Whole Self gives you.

Your Whole Self is you beyond space and time. Your spiritual energy as it is manifested at any point in space-time up until its ultimate perfection (or wholeness). Your Whole Self is your spiritual guide. It shows you slices of your potential future selves (and all possibilities are open).

To effect change in yourself now, you simply awaken your imagination to who you want to be at some point in the future. Your Whole Self will tell you what you need to do now to realize that future self as you imagine it. Your Whole Self speaks to you through your intuition and you tell it what you want through your imagination.

As your body and your circumstances now are the result of your past actions, so too are your present actions manifested in the future. Your Whole Self tells you what actions to take to manifest the future self that you want. If you are in touch with your Whole Self, you will always know what to do (”right action”, as the sages call it) to stay on the right path.

Your Whole Self is your self existing throughout space-time, whole and perfect (cover art to Cynic's Focus album by Robert Venosa)

A Taste

I discovered my Whole Self while meditating last week. While doing the meditation exercise my master had given me, I became aware of the physical character of my thoughts, and the thought-like character of my actions, all intertwined. I realized I could project my own reality, my future self, to guide me. Since then, I often imagine a future self walking within me or in front of me. A real potential being present as energy. Me, but more confident and vibrant, taller and more fit, completely healthy and wearing a nicer outfit ( ). He laughs with me, remembering the silly mistakes he made along the way that I’m making now, and is incredibly patient and compassionate. Knowing that there already is a “you” who has accomplished what you want to accomplish, and is what you want to become, is incredibly liberating and empowering. You need but follow the path of “right action”.

This article is a taste meant to introduce the Whole Self. I’m sure I’ll probably be writing a lot more about the Whole Self as I come to understand more about it.

Unprecedented Opportunity: The Moral Imperative for Growth

You and I are the luckiest people who have ever lived. The simple fact that, for example, you are reading this blog marks you as one of a handful of global elite supported by a complex and highly developed social infrastructure and culture. You enjoy enormous wealth, privilege and opportunity the likes of which have never before been seen in history. (Take financial wealth alone. If you make only $25,000/year, you are among the top 10% of the richest people in the world.)

We are among the first generations for whom self-actualization is a real possibility. We have the opportunity to choose where we live, even becoming global nomads  if we wish. For the first time in history, all the world’s knowledge, it’s sciences, philosophies and religions are open to us. We have now the opportunity and means for deciding our own social roles. We can choose what kind and how many loving relationships we want. We can choose meaningful and fulfilling work. We can enjoy searching for and living our individual life purpose. Even our parents never had such freedom. We are near Gods, creators of our own destinies.

At the same time, the world is coming apart at the seams, offering up monolithic and fearful challenges that threaten life as we know it. This is the inherent danger that lurks at every increasing level of societal development. As we know from Spiral Dynamics, each new level of collective consciousness solves problems of the previous level and also creates new ones.

With the emergence of each new level, not all of human society progresses to the next level. Only those societies and indivduals at the cutting edge. The increasing complexity of cultural conflicts comes as a result that we have people and societies living at -all- levels of consciousness, but with access to the technologies and ideologies of all the other levels. Thus ethnocentrically-centered political and religious leaders with weapons of mass destruction. The distance between the lower and higher levels of consciousness grow. Each level brings greater opportunities for freedom and expanding consciousness, but also greater dangers for fucking it all up on horrific scales. The stakes get ever higher.

We privileged are extremely few. The daily reality for much of the world is brutal. Most live in horrifying poverty, in the midst of war or at the mercy of overt and severe political and religious oppression. As we elite enjoy more freedom and more opportunity, those below experience even more poverty. For poverty exists as the distance between what some have and some do not. The more we have, the more impoverished those without. A moral responsibility lies on us all to close this gap.

There are two ways in which we can meet these challenges, both in the present and in the future. In the now, we must seek out direct solutions through community activism, non-profits and other such initiatives. We use these tools now available to us to express our compassion.

Unfortunately, these short-term solutions are not enough. Most of them do not address the root cause of humanity’s problems, which is a narrow view of self. Lower levels of moral consciousness focus on what is good for the self as individual, one’s family, one’s clan. Most of us do not extend our compassion and understanding beyond an ethnocentric or nationalistic frame. The average level of consciousness is simply not great enough to overcome this selfish self.

Pursuits like self-development and spirituality are critical in raising the average level of global consciousness. It seems selfish to work on oneself when there is so much altruistic work to be done in the here and now (and indeed it must be done, we can’t all leave a man bleeding to death in the street to chase down his killer), but lasting solutions to our 1st-tier (see Spiral Dynamics) problems will only come when a critical mass of us have reached 2nd-tier levels of consciousness. Otherwise we’ll always just be cleaning up after own bloody mess.

For you and I, heaven on earth is within reach for a pittance of blood, sweat and tears. Yet most of us are barely even aware of the opportunities that are laid at our feet. We subconsciously inherit the social structures and values of our cultures, instead of consciously choosing our own and becoming our own personal anarcho-utopian islands of free and full individual men and women.

For the good of all, it is necessary to pursue your own passions and grow into your own true self. Increasing freedom for you is increasing freedom for us all.