“IYLI” CHAPTER NINE: EXPERIENCING REASON
Experiencing Reason... Step nine, making direct amends where possible, only doing so without causing injury to myself or others, is the second most feared step in the entire program, but also happens to be like the fourth step, in which both have the innate power to transform your life for the better. The reason both of these steps appear on their face to be scary, is because the ego works to bring about fear surrounding something that has the opportunity to create added freedom.
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CHAPTER NINE:
Experiencing Reason
Walking the talk…
Step nine, making direct amends where possible, only doing so without causing injury to myself or others, is the second most feared step in the entire program, but also happens to be like the fourth step, in which both have the innate power to transform your life for the better. The reason both of these steps appear on their face to be scary, is because the ego works to bring about fear surrounding something that has the opportunity to create added freedom.
The ego is a smart and cunning conspirator to life until it’s just a part of life and no longer what you allow to control decision making. Meaning, whenever something in your life has the likelihood of bringing you peace, clarity, evolved consciousness, or the chance at further happiness, the mind starts bringing up all the reasons you should be scared of something and should choose to make another choice about something. This is not done to persecute you, but done to show you the way towards freedom. The ego plays its hand every time it brings up a degree of fear in your awareness, or anytime your thoughts stray towards ways to hide or not tell the truth. There is no mountain peak without a valley, and there are no mile-high views without first having to climb somewhere to reach them. The ego is the valley, the 12-steps are the climb, you are the climber, and the views are the awareness of higher truths.
It is no coincidence that when you have something coming up in your life that will be seen as a blessing in hindsight, the mind starts bringing up all the possibilities about how it could fail, turn out bad, crumble between your fingers, or just not happen at all. The ego and the lower aspects of it can often feel prosecutorial, but in reality, they present a pathway towards truth through surrender. There has never been a time in my life where significant good happened without first having some degree of fear surrounding the moments leading up to it, and the same is said for this particular step in the program.
When I was getting ready to work through step nine in my own experience with these steps, I heard people all around me say how freeing the experience would be, how cathartic the experience would be, and how much healing would come from the completion of the step. But until I finished the step myself, I didn’t have the knowingness that those voices around me were correct. Internally, what continued to arise before every person I had to make an amends with, a diffuse, internal awareness of fear surrounding what was about to happen would present itself. In every instance of making amends, despite the words that were part of the overall amends with a particular person, the end result was the same: gratitude.
This step and this chapter dealing with reason are part of the same thing: surrender leading to forgiveness, and forgiveness leading into gratitude. What you may or may not have noticed throughout the last five chapters of section two, and even with this step, we’re putting forgiveness into action. In the first three steps of section one, we put surrender into action, and now we’re headed towards putting forgiveness into further action once we take the last step forward into fully embodying forgiveness through step nine.
These steps were not originally designed, many years ago, to be broken up into three parts labeled Surrender, Forgiveness and Gratitude. This is only my observation of them in hindsight. However, the magic of the steps in being created is they embody these three characteristics baked into them. Separately, after completing the steps in totality, the realization came to me that my journey to the realization of the Self as God, could best be characterized as a three-step journey repeating itself over and over again which led to truth, with those steps being surrender, forgiveness and gratitude. These steps are where the power of change resides because these steps acquaint you with each component of witnessing God, and then they put those components of truth into practice, regardless of anyone recognizing the process unfolding. The magic is in the fact that these steps allow someone to put godly characteristics into practice through this format, and then habitually practice them moving forward in your daily life as spiritually based patterns of behavior. This step is the final culmination of learning what forgiveness looks like, understanding the significance of it, and then actively not only choosing forgiveness, but first accepting it and then practicing it.
Dr. Hawkins describes the characteristics of the level of reason as holding a view of God as wise, while seeing your life as meaningful. The main way someone at this level emotes within the world is as actively understanding how life works and how the laws of nature show merit and value. What also starts taking place at the beginning stages of reason is that deep down inside your being you start to witness that life is more than the concrete, more than the Newtonian definable world, more than what’s seen. There begins to be the ability to see your decisions and fears are not rooted many times in validity or even investigative proofs. When you start this step there is a definite reason you’re doing so, even if it just feels like you’re doing so because the steps naturally lead to this point. But as you work through this step and finish it, you have an innate knowingness that something more important happened internally as a result of this step, and the reason for completing it wasn’t just to check another box off the list.
The level of reason and the degrees to follow until arriving at love subjectively, take you through the Newtonian paradigm of existence, and bring the spiritual traveler squarely against having to take another leap of faith to progress into love and beyond, with that faith point being surrendering over the belief that causality is the highest form of likelihood and probability in the Universe. Meaning, is science the highest function of life, or is science an aspect of life which has a larger context from which it arises? Also meaning, is the brain and corresponding thoughts, feelings and emotions, what I am, or am I something that witnesses and observes these things take place? Within the level of reason comes scientific breakthroughs and discoveries beneficial to the human body and the physical world, but what also gets created are more and more ways to harm another individual, as well as more and more seemingly valid reasons to hold grudges against other people. The problem with the intellect is that it has a limit to its cognition, with the limit being that which expresses itself outside of the normal operations of the brain’s functioning. The level of reason is also known as the level of the intellect, with this being the final calibrated level of consciousness to be transcended before one has the ability to know they’re more than the mind, but less than all there is.
Just like the shared fear many have for this step, a similar question arises in choosing to complete it: do I know what will take place once I make an amends, or do I have to choose faith that what will come from the amends process is greater than what I think I already know?
A reasonable person would admit there is more to life than what they know, and logic would state that there’s almost an infinite amount of learning possible over the course of a lifetime. So, how could you possibly know what will happen after you make an amends if you’ve never made one? And in this paragraph, you have now seen the ability to logically choose faith.
The truth is, we aren’t what we think we are. We’re actually closer to that which allows for thought to even be possible. In ultimate reality, we’re not what we believe ourselves to be or how science defines us, but that which is the context for definition to even arise out of. Reason is a high level of consciousness, and it is possibly also the hardest level of consciousness to transcend, because to do so you have to be willing to surrender your attachment to thinking your way to God and to the beliefs that God is found through religion. God is not experienced in the mind or in a book, only described and acknowledged there through words. Love is not found in the mind, in the brain, in your emotions, feeling and thoughts, but only experienced as outside of all that and separate from any functioning of the mind at all. If you desire to truly know God as opposed to just think that God exists, one has to be willing to lay down what they think is their life to God and choose faith in the unknown currently.
Luckily, the last three steps of this program create a context of understanding gratitude as more than a word and concept, and because of such will be something you’ll get to experience the effects of as opposed to just read about. In the levels that comprise reason, the individual inhabiting this space will be brought face-to-face with the reality that God is beyond explanation, that infinity is beyond the mind’s ability to witness, and that the love you feel as a result of working these steps does not have a quantifiable degree of definition within the world of science that does it justice, or that compares in the slightest to an actual experience with the creator beyond what reason says is possible. Logic is born out of reason, but even the highest degrees of logic fall woefully short of actually subjectively experiencing the reality of divinity when it presents itself. At twenty, when divinity first presented itself to me in ways unknown before then, there was nothing logical or reasonable about what was taking place. God was just there in a way that the moment before God was not. When you find Truth, you will realize that lesser truths pale in comparison.
Again, the mind and the ego are the same thing, and the ego/mind believes itself to be God. The only way to see that the ego/mind is not God is to fully surrender it over to a power greater than yourself with the faith that what I say here is true about the outcome: God is not found in the mind, but quite naturally outside of it, and because of this fact, it’s safe to walk straight ahead no matter what, constantly surrendering over your attachment to this world and all its trappings, because the end result of transcending the ego is not death but Life.
TRUTHS
(The Gospel of Thomas) Be wise like the fisherman who caught many fish. He kept the biggest fish, and returned the rest to the sea.
(The Dhammapada) Studying many scriptures is pointless if one does not practice the wisdom contained within them.
(The Bhagavad Gita) I abide in hearts out of compassion, replacing ignorance and darkness with a shining lamp.
(Chuang Tzu) Perfect wisdom comes spontaneously to those who seek it.
CONTEMPLATING ON TRUTH
Wisdom comes as a thief in the night, never announcing its arrival, but when it becomes apparent there’s an outdated belief that lost its importance due to the arrival of a new contextual understanding, the house of the patron is left forever changed and altered in some unseen but subjectively felt way. However, unlike a thief, wisdom doesn’t remove anything, instead, it leaves giving more than it took. I never spent much time fishing growing up, although it was available as a regular activity, but the idea of leaving all the little fish swimming and only keeping the mountable fish was not lost on me. I grew up around fishermen and those who claimed to be such, for in the south and growing up on a river, tall tales of river monsters vary far and wide. In the world of fishing there are a couple different types of cast-men: those who keep everything without being worried by the size of the catch, and those who keep everything they believe is worth bragging about. The first group keeps everything because they’re hungry or bored, malicious, or without a mentor who taught them the sport of fishing. However, the person who keeps the trophy fish does so for the purpose of pride and a sense of accomplishment, and rarely out of hunger or boredom do these men and women cast their lines amongst the still waters. What I never witnessed was a fisherman who kept only the single finest fish they ever caught, for how could they, it would take a lifetime to know the results. The funny thing is, the only difference between the second type of fisherman and the type of fisherman I never met, is wisdom. Isn’t knowing for ourselves that we caught many big fish in our lifetime the reward in and of itself? And wouldn’t one man’s “biggest fish” be a different size from another man’s “biggest fish?” When one embraces reason, they choose logic and rationale, as well as discernment and wisdom, and like the thief who comes at night, pride remains lost, but replaced with a higher truth. If a fisherman were only to recognize the fish they know could not be matched from a lifetime of pursuit, wouldn’t it be reasonable that this man or woman would have mastered the art of fishing, or at the very least, realized along the way that fishing is but another way to find a tale worth telling for all to hear?
Is it not reasonable to assume that if someone ceases from daily movement and interaction, they have stopped pursuing actionable steps in their life towards betterment and improvement? Is it not also possible that within inaction there also remains the possibility of inner action happening continuously? This is the quandary of the masses when looking at spirituality, for is it better to be doing something the world can see or to be doing something within your being that only God is aware of? Has not Christian scripture noted that prayer and righteous actions should be done away from the view of prying eyes, and doesn’t Hindu scriptures say that either path is in fact actionable?
So, what is a spiritual traveler to do with the notion that only putting to practice what is found within scripture is the higher road to pursue towards the experience of a union with the Self, or with divinity, or with God? The truth is, one cannot effectively and with knowingness have the awareness that both options produce the same result. Unless they’ve chosen a path and followed it to its conclusion. However, before one can know the truth of peace found within the seeming inaction of the enlightened being, they first have to put into practice what is found within holy scriptures and stop believing that reading what someone else says is all that’s needed for finding inner peace. Right words, right action, right thoughts, and right intentions are not found solely in words, but one won’t know that until they put certain words into practice every day. Just because someone can talk about God in a way you find intellectually stimulating, that person’s words only point someone towards putting them into practice. If you find that a spiritual teacher is without practice and comes not from personal experience, it might be time to leave their flock and find another, for their words have neither action nor inaction in the realities of higher truths. Without doing what another person has done, one cannot speak from a place of knowingness about its efficacy. Without walking the footsteps of another who has gone before you, one cannot reach a level of consciousness where more is being accomplished through what the world sees as inaction, compared to the work of a million people actively moving through the world to gain praise for their actions. One must first put into practice that which an enlightened teacher shows them as actionable steps before having the opportunity to know that action and inaction are actually one in the same thing.
One of the greatest missteps to life that modern man has created for himself is in wrongly interpreting what Jesus meant by “experiencing heaven on Earth.” As an entity who regularly experiences life as heavenly, meaning, from one perfect moment to the next perfect moment, I can officially say that from my experience, Jesus has been misunderstood to such a degree that his words of enlightenment with regards to living in a heavenly state have served to separate Love from the lover, and the practitioner from the practice of Love. As one moves up the evolutionary scale towards being one with that which created him, it becomes clear that more and more Love present is what produces heavenly outlooks and experienceable moments of heavenly perfection while on earth.
Krishna is stating something similar above by referencing compassion as the abode for his presence. Krishna was Love, as Jesus was Love, with both arising from the same source and both representing a perfected union with God. We all arise from the same source as well, but when we choose ignorance and darkness as opposed to acceptance and reason, we’re separating ourselves from Love, and thereby choosing to live in a world where heaven is not a possible destination nor a state of regular experience. As long as fear remains a person’s regular mode of operation and primary choice paradigm, Jesus will always be the person whom you don’t understand and can’t relate to, until ignorance and darkness are no longer chosen regularly. No man or woman can know that Jesus and Krishna were not here to be idolized and proselytized for but were here as examples of a path forward where all one has to do is follow their lead and do as they did. Heaven as a reality doesn’t come easily, and it’s not found behind judgment or holding resentments, but through regular surrender, constant forgiveness, and a willingness to register all gratitude as worthy of a paused moment of reflection. Only then, will Jesus and Krishna start to become fellow travelers on your journey towards your own union with God. And only then can you show the world through actions and not your words that both Jesus and Krishna experienced the same reality of God.
Once one reaches a level of love or above as their current state of reality, what was said above becomes more obvious. However, until one realizes that Krishna and Jesus were here to show the possibility of being, taking on the human form, heaven and compassion will remain over there and otherworldly. The fastest path towards Truth is surrender, forgiveness and gratitude, in that order and practiced relentlessly until they become part of every waking hour.
If one seeks understanding as the sole basis to create wisdom, they’ll soon be left with less than knowledge. Reason dictates that one thing is not something else, hence, understanding is not knowledge, however, when understanding is put to the test and lived out, knowingness in equal parts becomes spontaneous. Perfect spiritual wisdom is not a fixed accumulation of points within a cause-and-effect paradigm, but it is a conglomerate of perfected clarities separate and apart from the Newtonian paradigm of scientific investigation, as well as immersed in it until that paradigm no longer has the capacity to contain it. Wisdom and the scientific method are independent of one another. They’re different paradigms, with wisdom arising out of a context of subjective knowingness and set apart from time tested methods of accumulated data leading towards only comprehending a phenomenon; while the Newtonian paradigm seemingly continues to move along its calculated path to the unenlightened and towards an A leading to B causality. It might arrive at a point of understanding, but the only knowledge gained is strictly capable of only producing more science, not more subjective knowingness. The world of wisdom is not governed by “this thing causing that thing,” and because of this fact, there will never be a scientific method for contextually creating wisdom, only a method for understanding an intellectual pursuit for the sake of a brain that also gave us Karl Marx and Joseph Stalin as leaders of countries and movements. If you seek wisdom above all else, it will be provided to you in spontaneous moments of perfect clarity, never found within causality, but always produced apart from the content most believe to be the real. Wisdom is not only for the aged of society but is open to all individuals brave enough to not settle for the run of the mill understanding of the agreed upon molecular make-up of a thing. The nature of God is not experienceable within science or religion, nor any other mechanism of the mind. Wisdom trumps knowledge every day in its power and usefulness, as knowledge trumps understanding, and yet wisdom would not be had without first having the awareness that knowledge of life’s choices is mandatory for wisdom’s sake. When wisdom arrives, it is not carried along by itself, for it springs up singular out of the lived experiences of subjective realities. Anything that arrives suddenly cannot be traced back to causality, it must arise out of a greater context. For life to arise it must come from Life, not from un-life.
INSTRUCTIONS ON STEP NINE
With our list in hand, we make a plan to address the wrongs we committed towards the people, places and things that became apparent needing to be made right from the previous step. We do not go into our amends process to say “I’m sorry” for what was done, but to make the situation right moving forward. We accomplish this task by admitting the exact nature of our wrongs, which sounds like an apology, except we’re not asking for forgiveness, only providing the information about how we believed we wronged the other entity. We do not make amends where it would hurt us or another person further from the offense committed. Meaning, if we cheated on another person and we feel that broke their heart, if they find themselves in a new relationship or marriage, we don’t selfishly make a direct amends just to make ourselves feel better. If we stole from someone, we go into the amends as a way to be willing to pay back that which we stole, no matter how long it takes. We make an amends for the purpose of cleaning up our side of the street, all the while knowing God has already forgiven us for the wrongs we committed. God has also made our standing straight again, so the amends process is not about groveling and repentance. It’s about admitting the nature of our wrongs in a manner where we address any elephants in the room. The process for an amends is straightforward: Call, text, email, or write the person you harmed and inform them you have been working through a 12-step program which has you now making an amends for past behaviors and decisions made. Then you ask them if they would be willing to sit down with you or talk over the phone and give you a chance to explain. If they say yes, make sure you have dates and times available for the occasion, but if those times don’t work for the person, be willing to work around their schedule.
Many times, the other person won’t reply or doesn’t want to talk about anything, which is fine. Leave the person at their wishes and come back to it a while later. Once you find yourself in front of the person or talking to them over the phone, lay out the script for the talk: The person in the program speaks first and talks through all the issues they created and why (without the other person interrupting; they’ll have plenty of time to talk); next, the person not in the program gets to talk all they want about what was just shared and whatever else they have on their mind about things (you don’t talk or make excuses during this time unless asked to talk); next, you ask them what you can do to make it right (we do anything we can within reason, never becoming the property of another or putting ourselves in further stressed situations that could cause damage to us physically or mentally); lastly, thank them for their time and for the opportunity to make things right. We make amends in another person’s home only if safe to do so, as in the case of family or old friends of the same sex. We make plans to meet in an occupied space where social interaction is normal. If the other person doesn’t want to see you, or you feel as if talking to another person would bring about too much stress and burden for each party, a living amends is applicable. A living amends works like this: say, you cheated on someone and broke their trust – never cheat on another person again; say, you stole from someone – never steal again; say, you lied to another person about something important – work to be truthful in all dealings moving forward; say, you had a span of years where you used people only for sex to make yourself feel better – be honest with all sexual partners moving forward about your intentions and why you’re choosing to sleep with them. This step is about making things right and cleaning up your side of the street with another person, place, thing or institution. If you have cheated the tax system for years, the proper amends is having your taxes done properly and paying the penalties associated with past choices. Do not make an amends to someone who you feel is dangerous or who has put you in compromising situations or could put you in compromising situations. The amends process is for cleaning up messes, and it is a safe environment for letting go of past baggage as well as working on not creating new baggage. People will be mad at you, upset with your past behavior, stunned that you reached out, and also delighted to be speaking again. Overall, once starting this step you will feel lighter and freer than you thought possible before this step began, and before it’s over you’ll start to embrace and understand more deeply what gratitude truly is.
If you find yourself making an amends and it turns south on you where your safety is at jeopardy, feel comfortable thanking the person for their time and leaving the interaction totally. In all my years of knowing people who do their amends, no one has come back with a horror story where they didn’t feel safe, although at times the other party remains angry and bitter after the talk, the amends isn’t about them finding relief from your actions, it’s about you admitting the nature of your actions and how you see that they affected the person you’re talking to.
STEP NINE
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I made direct amends to who I could and where possible, only doing so free of injury to them, myself, and others in our life.
STEP NINE PRAYER
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I have fear around this step and I have apprehensions about the relief possible from telling another how I wronged them. I surrender over this fear and these apprehensions. Thank you for the chance to clean up my side of the street.