“IYLI” CHAPTER FIVE: EXPERIENCING COURAGE
Experiencing Courage… Life is sweeter when you have love filling it up. Courage, as in the title of this episode, is where we get to start feeling lighter and lighter once being freed from the lower levels of consciousness. When we reach a level of experiencing the world around us from that of courage, we start to know we are more than meets the eye, more than the body, more than something just existing out in time and space separate from everything else. To get to this point in the steps, you have worked 1-4 previously, and if you have actually done so, and not just read about them, you will have experienced miracles arise within your everyday witness of life. This chapter and this step are for the brave men and women among us, for the spiritual traveler who has set their intent on knowing God in this lifetime as more than a belief system.
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CHAPTER FIVE:
Experiencing Courage
I was ready for a change…
There is a shift of perception and consciousness that happens once someone has the humility to admit to themselves, and to God, that they in fact are in need of help. The personal ego has an innate belief structure within it that it is in fact god, so it is not a natural proclivity for those still a total slave to the ego to admit they are not the center of the universe in the ways they believe to be true.
During my most ardent days of falling well short of having love present with any regularity, I would search for hope in places where the wells were dry and the spigots turned off. I would look for joy in the arms of a new lover, hope in the presence of a new job, love in a fun night out, and overall definitions for life in some self-help book written by yet another person that claims to have the answers. And for a higher price I could actually hear it in person. For an additional charge, even walk away with an autograph. Our physical world and all of its content is nothing more than a grand display of the ego, with our attachments presenting varying degrees of enslavement to it. From the television we watch to the religious services we attend, the people we interact with, the books we read, the conversations we have, and on and on and on it goes. All roads in the world lead to just more roads in the world, all without providing the traveler a trustworthy compass.
All of the searching for God out in the world, and more precisely, all of the hiding I did out in the world hoping God wouldn’t notice, amounted to a well of information about where Love is not found in abundance. I’m not saying that God is not out in the world for all to see, or in our church services and self-help teachings, but the world and the content of the world is but a smaller fraction of the aspect of God we call consciousness. And if we settle for the world as opposed to push for our own experience with God, we’ll always remain in a constant state of searching without ever finding. In fact, the world is created in some ways to be a place which creates perpetually the ability to constantly search without finding, to seek without discovering, and to think without true thoughts.
Consciousness is the backdrop of life and all experience, and it is the same thing as what the bible and other religious texts refer to as God’s greatest characteristics: omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. As was stated earlier in the book, consciousness can be broken down into levels of abstraction and subjective perception which Dr. David R. Hawkins discovered and spent the latter half of his life lecturing about and teaching on. I have found the levels of consciousness to be worth their weight in gold for contextualizing how this world works and how/why everything happens, from seeming randomness to calculating exact reactions of another based on where they calibrate currently. The levels of consciousness are a major indicator of context for the writing of this book, but they are not what this book is about. They are only further moments of deeper understanding as to what happens within the individual as they grow closer to truth or fall further away from it. The levels of consciousness are nothing more than a map of how life works within the confines of spiritually looking at the great expanse of creation through evolution. (Note: creation and evolution are one in the same.)
As I found relief in surrendering over to God powerlessness with an alcohol addiction, I also found an understanding of what was taking place within my being as following the exact levels of consciousness discussed by Dr. Hawkins. At first, once looking at his map, I didn’t know how accurate it was or even what it meant, but as I evolved upwards, it not only provided a context for what was happening to me, but I started to pay attention to how accurate it was for contextualizing every aspect of a rapidly changing life. The levels he describes are not a religion or even a belief system. They are a quantifiable way to understand life and how it works regardless of our awareness of it at any point in time. So far in this book, we have spent time working towards transcending lower levels of consciousness through the acts of varying degrees of surrender, and most recently moved into a realm of forgiveness being the meat of discussion for steps four and five. As I found a way to understand what was taking place as a consequence of working the steps through the map of consciousness, this step can be likened to that by seeing the “ah-ha” moments that arose from step four and by coming face to face with the “ah-ha” moments which will be a result of successfully completing step five.
All of this book has made its way to the moment at hand where we move from transcending the lower levels of the ego and start understanding how the ego persists through the integrous realms of existence starting with the level of courage. Once one finds that courage is the underpinning of their experience of life, they have transcended fear in all of its forms. By transcending fear, I do not mean the spiritual aspirant no longer experiences forms of fear or lesser ego states, but one is no longer a slave to the ego and all the forms of fear it has at its disposal. Once someone has surrendered over their life to God and has earnestly taken the first three steps of this book, there is no possible way they have not transcended fear. If you integrously take the first three steps of this book, you are at the very least operating from a level of courage or above. The first three steps require brutal honesty, and it’s in the brutal honesty that you first find God. And because of brutal honesty, you now have the opportunity to come from a place of courage rather than from a lower ego state. Why this is important is because if you don’t do Step One perfectly, and by perfectly we mean with absolute honesty, Steps Two and Three become just a formality, and you continue to just blow smoke.
Where we find ourselves now in relation to the steps, is at a place where forgiveness begins for the self and the world around us through step four, and then gets to take on new steam and significance through the working of step five where we see naturally that forgiveness for everything is the key to experiencing more and more love. This step is where we get to see courage in action, as well as the gifts of the spirit which come from a lightened load with regards to all the baggage we carried for so long, now being let go of, creating lighter steps forward. Forgiveness is about letting God handle the grudges, the resentments, the angers and pains, and because of this we have a way through these steps as an actionable witness to this happening without having to do any of the heavy lifting.
When one reaches a level of courage, they take on a whole new attitude about God, life, their circumstances, emotional states, and how they interact with the world. Through Dr. Hawkins’s map of consciousness, we see that once courage is present as one’s level of consciousness, their view of the creator is one of being permitting of change for the better of the individual, almost as if they now feel like God is allowing them to experience grace and blessings. Their life-view has now shifted from demanding more of the world to satiate their appetite, to one where positive change and a better life feels feasible and within their grasp. Words of affirmation become powerful motivators for those calibrating closely to courage, and their entire outlook on life and how they process the world becomes one of empowerment as opposed to inflation of the ego.
The same reflection of change in one’s personal outlook on the world through Dr. Hawkins’s map of consciousness once reaching courage, is the same thing happening in the 5th step of this program: the practitioner leaves the world of carrying around past baggage and finds that they have reached a destination where it’s okay if their bags were lost during the trip. The 5th step is where we unburden ourselves of what we uncovered about our self and the life we lived up until this point, and also where we begin to see that forgiveness is the gift which creates the context for experiencing gratitude as a reality and not as something needing to be faked.
In this step, the person working the steps shares with someone who has completed the steps, all that was found as a byproduct of their searching and fearless moral inventory. The person who has the honor of listening to the finished fourth step is as blessed to be a part of the process as the blessings that will soon flow into the life of the person who performed their fourth step. The relationship between the talker and the listener in this phase of the program is mutually healing and cathartic and is another example of actively choosing faith through surrendering over the enslavement to inner fears brought on by the personal ego.
As was stated earlier, if there is not someone in your life who can be the partner to your fourth step, and listen to you unload all that you have found, look to a priest, pastor, Imam, close friend and confidant, a parent, your therapist or counselor for aid in finishing this step. To complete the fifth step, all you have to do is admit out loud to yourself, to God, and to another human being, the exact nature of your wrongs which you found by working the fourth step – it’s that simple. Within the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, and I’m paraphrasing, it is stated that you will be amazed and feel a lightness of being before the steps are finished, and because of the magic of steps 1-4, when you get to step five, if you haven’t felt life shift for you or you haven’t had your perceptions of life change yet, be ready for a major “ah-ha” moment to arise from finding yourself speaking out loud to another what you found binding about your life to date.
What we hold inside tends to bring about pain because to keep the past hidden and locked away we hold traumas and mistruths as precious to us, or too painful to embrace and let go of. What happened to us in our past happened to us in our past. What happened to us in our past was moments in time we’ve already survived. What happened to us in our past are examples of the strength and resiliency of being in human form, but just because we have a past doesn’t mean it’s worth being attached to any longer.
The aspect of this step that holds the potential for such relief and such a lightness of being, is in saying out loud to another as well as to God simultaneously, what we once hid and used to define our view of ourselves as being separate from the world around us, is now worth letting go of for a new vantage point moving forward. When you share with another person your baggage, you get an immediate understanding through the interaction that they too have shared in some of the same baggage, which only serves to bring the fourth-stepper closer to the realization that they are not alone, nor are they someone who should continue believing they are any longer.
Just like writing the fourth step down on paper, we share the fifth step out loud so our mind is not the final destination where truth can be limited or have an opportunity for manipulation. When we open up to another about who we are and what we’ve done, the direct result is choosing faith over fear, openness over hiding, honesty over deception, and truth over manipulation.
This particular step signifies something massively important and unique for all of those brave enough to get to this point, which is a display to ourselves and to God that in fact we have chosen Truth over falsehood, Power over force, Salvation over skepticism, Joy over pain, and Life over death.
If you take a moment at this point in the program to survey what has transpired since starting this work, what you’ll find, at the very least, is someone who prayed to God or maybe asked the universe for help with life, for help with some aspect of life, with that prayer or request being answered in the form of what you’re doing now. You have made it this far in the book and are more than halfway done with regards to the effort needed to finish the steps. You have done something in working steps 1-4 that very few people in the halls of time have had the opportunity to do, which is to look at life from a different angle and actively choose God through your choices with regards to this book and working the program it contains.
On the surface, it doesn’t sound like a tough thing to do, to complete the first three steps of this program, and honestly, even when reading about the fourth step it doesn’t appear to be all that challenging. But when you look deeper into what it is you have accomplished by surrendering your life over to a power greater than yourself in step three, as well as setting the contextual stage for understanding the ego enough to be aware of the choices you were making in steps one and two, by the time you have reached step four, which requires a major undertaking to complete, you have already asked God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, the Alpha and Omega, the up and the down, the left and the right, the here and the there and everything in between, to remove the ownership of your life from your hands and have placed the direction of life forever more into the hands of Absolute Love. Not only have you given your will and life over to something greater than yourself, but you’ve taken time to deliberately look back on a life that up until recently you had seeming control over, but at the end of the day wasn’t worth more than the possibility of what can come from letting go and letting God take the wheel. It is incredible what you have accomplished by simply buying or finding this book, reading the introduction and forward of the book, staying with the dialogue through steps four and winding up here at five. By finishing this step, you’re making the conscious decision to look back over the totality of your life and write down what attachments came up needing to be let go of, and what that actually means is that you have chosen God and Truth and Love for your future over what the ego has in store for you.
You have chosen Life, my friends.
You have chosen Love, my friends.
What you have done up until this point through working these steps is nothing short of a miracle. One day soon, in the not-so-distant future, you will be able to take another person through these steps because you finished working them. By working these steps, you have chosen to be the change you wished to see in the world, and because of being that change first, you’re now able to share the message of change with everyone you come in contact with by just having your presence available to people.
At some point in your life, you will be able to share your journey and experience with another person, and because of you working these steps you’ll be able to pass this information on to the next journeyman looking for a little more peace and joy in their life. And because of that you’ll be able to deliver God to them as well through a personal connection with divinity. You are the change the world needs and the change the world will need for generations to come – all because you let God know you’re ready to be the change and decided to practice surrender, forgiveness and gratitude.
I am filled with joy you made it this far and have but a little more way to go to find completion with these steps. Hang in there, stay loose and focused, and don’t forget to watch the world stay the same around you but yet different at the same time, all while the world notices that something has changed in you. The way it works is someone you know or people you meet will say there’s something different about you, something engaging and peaceful, and because of this you won’t have to proselytize about God, you’ll be a witness of God’s nature by just what you are, and then best of all, be able to point them in the direction of finding joy in their own life not through telling someone a half-truth, but by speaking from firsthand experience. You are learning how to fish while actively fishing. Soon, you won’t catch someone a fish, but teach them how to string up a line. You are living a spiritual life by working these steps, and before you know it, the realization will arise that you made a decision to live like Jesus without ever knowing it. Because you live like Jesus means you have the opportunity to experience God for yourself in the days and weeks and months ahead. Living like Jesus is what this book is all about. This book is not about religion or buying into what a religion tells you – this book is about actively being love and producing love through righteous actions and deliberate devotion.
Mark my words: if you finish these steps integrously, earnestly, honestly, and whole heartedly, your life will have a noticeable change forever, and the world will take notice and comment about the fact that happiness is all around you, even in the face of difficult times and challenges. The world will take notice that you have changed before you ever notice the difference in how you move throughout life. Your family will notice there’s something different about you, as will your friends and colleagues, before you notice you’re moving through the world differently from ever before.
TRUTHS
(The Gospel of Thomas) Your salvation comes from being aware of what is already inside of you. If you are unaware, you will remain subject to death.
(The Lankavatara Sutra) One achieves self-realization by practicing mental concentration. He will thus come to the state of Noble Wisdom.
(The Upanishads) The purpose of things in your life is not for you to love them, but to love the Self in all things.
(The Tao Te Ching) He who identifies himself with the world, receives the world. He who sees himself as the world comes to accept it.
CONTEMPLATING ON TRUTH
I spent the better part of three decades thinking that my salvation would be found outside of myself and in the hands of another. I spent more than thirty years looking for the answers to life’s toughest questions from sources beyond the confines of my inner-being. I looked and I looked and I looked, until all the looking led me back to the source, and to the answer I had been pursuing for so many years: God is not to be found somewhere outside of me, but was within the very core of my being the entire time. This revelation brought not only comfort in my darkest hour but hope for the chance at a better life than I was currently experiencing. If God is found within me, God is found within you as well, and because God is found within you and me, God is at the core of all mankind for both the lost and the saved alike. The truth of existence, consciousness and the riddles of old, is not that we have anything to accomplish while in physicality, but we have only to recognize, experience, witness and observe that which is within all of us quietly presenting itself a million times over in every moment of now, which is why realization springs forth from being in this body to begin with. If you choose to remain unaware that within you is the source of all of life, then you are choosing to ignore the most precious gift we all have - the gift of Life. We are not separate from the Creator, we’re one with the Creator. We’re not outside of God’s grace, but many are continually operating ignorantly to the fact that grace is a gift already given, just maybe not yet realized and not yet allowed to be received.
The fastest way to salvation is through humility and forgiveness, and consequently, the fastest way to understanding who Jesus was in the flesh, is through exercising humility and forgiveness in your own life repeatedly. Jesus was made flesh for a myriad of reasons, but one of those reasons is much more powerful than most people choose to see: What Jesus was, is also what you are in your core, total potential for a life lived through complete and total unconditional love for yourself, mankind, and the Creator, for you already are all of those things you just don’t know that yet. What was in Jesus is also within you, it’s just you haven’t taken the time to look within and search deep enough for the truth yet. One cannot look within without noticing there’s more than flesh and bones present around the heart.
The linear world is designed in such a way as to keep our attention focused outward on the goings on of everyday existence, as opposed to looking within for the truth found through self-realization as the result of deliberate devotion. All that we see around ourselves is a wide array of opportunities to play in the chaos or to choose to quiet such noise through inner contemplation and seek Peace within. The hardships that one faces in life are not due to being unequipped for the journey of life, but in believing that Life is found in what the eyes see, as opposed to what the experiencer experiences, the observer observes, and the witnesser witnesses. Pain in this life is the result of resisting life as it unfolds, whereas joy in this life comes from watching life unfold while surrendering over one’s control over it and desire to change it, and experiencing self-realization as a result.
It is wise and good to love all that you are for the sake of loving what is, but it is wiser to love all that you are because you have concentrated long enough on what you are not, in order to see that Love is all you truly are – love, in a greater or lesser degree of intensity. Only through mental concentration, only through mindfulness, only through contemplation, meditation, forgiveness, surrender, prayer and the like, and all of that which quiets the endless chatter of thoughts within one’s head, can someone realize that Noble Wisdom speaks louder than the fire of a thousand cannons, or the march of a million neatly filed soldiers approaching the lines of battle. Noble Wisdom can be had only when someone no longer is attracted to the sights and sounds of the masses, but instead has chosen to experience the truth of witnessing what arises externally but not reacting to it or fixating on an opinion of it.
At this point if you choose so, at the point of walking forward with self-realization as your unfolding, subjective life experience, one can finally know that the content of the outside world is of little consequence to the energies of fluctuating truth now flowing through your beingness upon placing no judgment on what’s found within the outside world. Mental concentration for the spiritual seeker is but a milestone one reaches moving up the evolutionary scale of consciousness, however, for the person who just seeks happiness and joy in their current life, mental concentration is a wonderful place to start, because it leads to self-realization.
The way most people on earth view one another is as separate beings coexisting, and because of this common perception of life, one often overlooks the value of connecting with one’s Self through a loving interaction with another. We are one another’s mirrors, not one another’s enemies. The way many people on earth look at Life, is as something meant to fulfill their wishes at little cost, and because of this garage-sale mentality, all the riches in the world will bring little Self-realization to any being, only more Saturday morning lawn sales without easy parking.
The way people see the world around them is based on its appearance to them and rooted in their current level of consciousness, i.e. how pretty a person is, how shiny an object is, how fashionable an idea might be, and so on, which is subjectively without objectivity, as well as based in the attracter pattern of glamour and not truth, whereas the true nature of the world around us is not how a thing appears but the absolute nature of essence in its many varieties of consciousness expressing itself within appearance and non-appearance simultaneously. The purpose of having “things” in our life is not so we can love them as we love that which is found within another, but so we may have an amplitude of ways to experience the true essence of that which we are beneath the glare, ‘the Self in all things.’ The content of the linear arises out of the context of the non-linear, or another way to understand this is: the stuff of life comes from Life itself. When we look at something on face value, especially as we seek to define its value, only what one holds as glamourous will amount to a gain, whereas, if one surrenders over their judgment of value to God, suddenly, what we once believed to be of great value now isn’t, and what was once thought to be of little value now is. What one owns is not what a person is, and what a person experiences is not what one is, but something magical happens when a person lets go of their attachment of what they believe something to be in exchange for surrendering over their opinion to God. What one sees is no longer a limited definition rooted in benefit or cost, but a viewpoint of what resides within the essence of what one is looking at. When a person no longer sees loss or gain when gazing out into the world around them, but sees the value inherit to a person or thing because of the context from which it arises, that viewer is now moving closer to God with every step forward.
It’s a difficult obstacle to step over when talking about being in the world but not of it, with the difficulty coming in the form of not knowing what the steps are to see yourself as the totality. We all have/had times of hardship, loneliness, desperation, solitude, depression, and every other form of occurrence and happenstance known as being part of man’s experience. However, we’ve all experienced moments of love as well, moments of joy, times of beauty, friendship, bliss, and even exuberant moments of pure happiness and possibly ecstasy. When the seeker realizes they are none of these things, neither the high nor low points, but that which witnesses them, the seeker has the opportunity to approach acceptance for the lot of it all, and it is only through acceptance of the entirety can one begin to let go of that which no longer defines who they choose to be as the singular.
Once one has accepted they are one with the world and a part of everything in it, and not run by a world without choice, they begin to understand the world is the perfect place to be in order to get where they have the potential to go, while being in the world but not of it moving forward. Living one’s life like a prayer is what being in the world but not of it means. Living one’s life like a prayer is easier than most people realize. Being in the world but not of it, when broken down to a few choices, is the blueprint for seeing “himself as the world,” and accepting it:
1. Forgive everyone for everything.
2. Surrender over everything all the time.
3. Allow gratitude and thankfulness to become part of conscious praise for the Creator and what’s created.
If you choose to identify with the world, you’ll be subject to the whims of the personal ego and the direct illusions of the will of the masses. On the other side of the coin, if you choose to see yourself as in the world but not of it, the momentary times of joy, happiness, sadness, loneliness, etc. will just be experienced as stimuli worth acknowledging and surrendering over. The truth is, you, reading this now, are not what you think you are. You are not disconnected from the source. You are not alone in this journey towards wholeness. And you are not on this planet to be better than anyone else with regards to comparison’s sake. You are here to realize all of these things are needed so that acceptance can springboard your life into one characterized by courage and grateful living.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR STEP FIVE
The person doing the steps finds someone to share with what they found within step 4. This person should be trusted, if possible have completed the steps before them, and is meant to be a sounding board for listening to what was found, not as someone to make you feel better about what was found. This step is not therapy or even counseling. The person who listens takes notes about aspects of what they hear as themes or as aspects of what continues to be repeated throughout the conversation. Once the person sharing their step four work is finished, the person listening simply remarks on what notes were taken and what inspiration came to mind for them as they listened.
It is best for this step to be taken in one sitting together, with breaks taken as necessary. This step can also be taken over the phone or via a FaceTime feature. The purpose for someone listening is to lend their life experience to what they hear, and this step is as much about the listener as it is about the speaker.
The listener listens until the speaker is done speaking. All information shared within their time together is confidential and between the two parties and God. The time spent together should be away from prying ears and is best done in seclusion somewhere with proper ventilation and within proximity to bathrooms and ample fluids.
Once the listener has shared their notes with the speaker, the listener can feel free to give their notes to the now finished 5th stepper.
STEP FIVE
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I admitted to God, myself, and to another human being, the exact nature of my findings.
STEP FIVE PRAYER
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Thank you Lord, for the gift of honesty, the gifts of love, and for the opportunity today to share with you and someone else in the blessings of truth.