So what is slavery?

To expand the idea of what slavery is to include both the world and internal states, I would redefine it as the following:

Slavery is the state of living with no perceivable choices.

You can see how this relates to the common definition of being bound in servitude to another. In such a state, there is no perceivable choice to disobey; punishment is too great and death can be meted out on a whim.

I like looking at slavery in terms of choice, because it shows how much of how we live our lives is enmeshed in a world view without it:

• Much of the employment in the world is where pay is low, there is little respect, and there is little option for quitting because of economic consequences. This is known as “wage slavery”.
• In society, depending on your social circle, there are certain assumptions that are not questioned without severe consequence. Noam Chomsky wrote about this occurring in the media. We’re trained to follow thought patterns by rote, automatically and without conscious choice. This could be known as “thought slavery”.
• In most relationships, each partner soon learns roles to play, topics to avoid, habitual behavior, and ways to avoid triggering pain in the other in order to keep the relationship stable. This is done without awareness or conscious choice, so could be called “relationship slavery”. It does not matter who looks like they have the upper hand in the relationship – if there is no perceived choice, it is still slavery.
• Internally, when we react to fears, we usually feel there are no choices. I may have a fear of missing out on life and losing control of the time in my life, and so I think I have to jump at things in order to both not miss out and not feel the fear. It is done automatically, without conscious choice. This is what fear does. This could be called “slavery of fear”.

Freedom

In the last post on enlightenment, I described enlightenment as simply living in the perception of Who You Are. You could also look at enlightenment as freedom, a state of being conscious of every little choice you have in every moment.

Life is choice. We are here to learn to choose with awareness. This is power.

Even in the self-improvement circles, we’re encourage to think we have problems, and thus cultivate the need to improve ourselves. It’s a need, not a desire. So if we look anew at the word of “need”, it implies there is no choice. The desire for balance turns into another form of slavery.

The term “workshop junkies” can apply to this. When you see something lacking in yourself, perhaps from feeling drained or from believing hype, you do not see a choice – you try to fill the lack. This is a form of addiction – which again is a perception of lack of choice, and therefore slavery.

The power of choice

Meditation – simply being in every moment fresh, aware and expansive – is related the full perception all the choices available. If I am watching my breath and my mind and someone insults me, I can breathe deeply and consciously choose my reaction. It could be a firm response. It could be a peaceful turning of the other cheek. It could be a humorous and gentle response. But if I am fully aware of all my choices, there is a great source of freedom and power available, knowing that whatever the other person does, they can not disconnect me from my inner foundation. If on the other hand, I go into reactivity, it is because I do not see a choice. I am attacked, therefore I must defend myself, even if doing so hurts me in the long run. This is being a slave to reactivity and habits.

If you think about what being loving to another is, choice is present during all manifestations of the expression of love. Often the best gifts are those that open doors and create more awareness of choices that have been overlooked. For instance, if you’re in a funk and depressed, being shown different perceptions, new experiences, new emotions, or new thoughts can offer much more awareness of the choices you’re making that contribute to your depression. Someone trying to cheer you up blinding without this can make you more depressed by contributing to that state of lack. Another possible gift might be to offer the choice of non-resistance – that one doesn’t have to fight depression as there are gifts inside it. This is a valid choice, and one with freedom inside it. But without the element of choice present, there is slavery, and where there is slavery there is no Love.

Simply looking at everything as choice – no matter how demanding it seems – brings us back to ourselves. It is fairly easy to think of the world as being a dark threatening place filled with cold demands, which is the world of slavery – in this world we have no choice but to react. Bringing choice into it shows how responsive the world can be to our creative powers.

The world

Now, Martin Luther King didn’t just speak about race equality. In fact, it’s rarely mentioned in standard history books that for the latter years of his life, he spoke more often against the economic system that creates a form of slavery, as well as the military industrial complex. This was a man who moved from working against one form of slavery to seeing all beings as brothers and working against slavery in all its forms. He spoke equally of the power of love to bring light into the world.

I’m involved in activism myself, and I work for a world where people have all the choices they desire. There’s no reason with all our advances that we need to enforce slavery in any form whatsoever. We don’t need it economically, in parenthood, in relationships, or internally. Giving others freedom brings us all joy because of the vast interconnection we’re a part of. Giving it to ourselves creates ripples that show a better way of living to all the world.

When we inhabit the full power of the choices we have in every instant – which is to say our powerful and creative nature – that is when we learn that our identity is nothing Love. The most creative, powerful force in existence.

Blog roll! I quite enjoyed the Viriditas Spiritual Center blog: she’s an ex-nun working in a homeless shelter, demonstrating her life in a very loving, selfish fashion. It’s amazing how service teaches us not to be in slavery.

If you like this, please StumbleUpon – it works and I appreciate it!

To honor this, I thought I’d share some channeling surrounding what healing actually is. Any similarities to actual persons in the examples are 100% not an accident. Nothing is!

On to the channeling…

Questions: What exactly is healing? How does one “do it”? It seems like a lot of times we think of healing as “getting over it”.

When we use the word ‘heal’ or ‘healing’, we are talking about allowing something to revert or assume its natural state. Most of you go through your lives with some part of you either physically or emotionally in a other than natural state. This creates conflicts and imbalances which allow you further opportunity for learning and growth. Healing, then, allows those parts of you to revert to their ‘normal’ state: A state of rest, a state without conflict, a state of peace.

Let us suppose there is a man who has some issues surrounding touch. They come for a variety of reasons, and mostly relate to his feelings that others have had a lack of regard, a lack of acknowledgment for who he is. This lack of regard or acknowledgment manifested in various ways, depending on for whom it came, but this has been a pattern in his life and has created a sense of internal conflict for him. On the one hand he feels he should accept touch, but a part of him wants to say ‘f*ck you’ (actual channeled words!) to himself and to all those others. So, how to heal this? What has he done to heal it? What will allow this situation to revert to it’s ‘natural’ state?

A lot of this depends, of course, on choice. There are myriad possibilities for what this natural state could be. There is no one right answer. In the case of healing of physical malady, a burn on the skin, then one would expect the cells of that part of the body to end up looking like, feeling like, and acting like the ones that were there before the injury. Well, what if the choice is to hold a memory of the injury as a reminder for something. In that case, the body could create scar tissue that would serve as a reminder. It would feel different and it would look different. Who decides which one is the natural state?

So let’s go back to the man.? As we see it, he has many possibilities open to him, and any one of them could be (if he wanted them to be)? his new natural state. It’s a matter of perception. And he could change his mind about it at any time and choose something else. The only real choice then, is choosing whether to experience this as conflict or choosing to create a different perception.

Question (follow up): So what would be a different perception of this conflict described above?

Why must he choose one or the other of acceptance and ‘f*ck you’? Why should they be mutually exclusive? Why can’t he have both? Again, it’s simply a matter of perception. The perception that one or the other is wrong is simply a perception he has decided to accept. The perception likely came from social or cultural or familial sources, but he is in a position to choose to accept or not to accept any of those perceptions that he has adopted in the past. The trick, then, is in figuring out what he wants and using that as his perception. What he wants. We don’t say that is an easy process, for often what you want is covered over by what you think others want. And allowing yourself the freedom to identify what you want is often difficult.

Although to some people channeling can seem a little ‘cold’, being present with the energy is one of the warmest, loving experiences I know. It’s also detached. This may seem contradictory, but to me goes hand in hand with the entities involved loving us so much they would never interfere with our choices and learning. There’s also a sense they give us that they don’t see any ‘problems’ with us, even pain. It’s their perception of perfection in all my experiences and my past that greatly aids me on my journey.

Too add to the last paragraph, I notice when I’m being asked “what do you want?”, there’s really no “you” in that statement. Look into the eyes of the next person asking you that. It’s more like “what desire is there?”? This is a real symptom of a consumerist culture – there’s little curiosity on who the person is we interact with, even our selves. Imagine the confusion of a teenage boy when being asked this regarding his future career. Knowing what you want goes hand in hand with knowing who you are, which is the spiritual journey in a nutshell. Acknowledging the magnitude of this question brings a great deal of self-honesty and reflection, resulting in a sifting through what we’ve been told we want from the inner radiant desires from within. We all can grow out of what we’ve been programmed to be and inhabit the magnitude of what we are.

I hope it’s helped you as well!

If you haven’t read the previous entry on compassion, please do so. I’m going to add to it, starting with the first comment as a basis question – on the subject of child abuse. It’s a very good question, and representative on most people’s initial response to thinking of compassion in terms of awareness and acceptance, rather than having a duty to do something to solve a problem. I realize this is a touchy subject, and that what is written here may be controversial because of the massive cultural pain that exists. However, bringing compassion to such a painful area brings a huge amount of clarity to how it is applied in the world.

Compassion applied to child abuse

Question: So in awareness of children being raped, tortured or mutilated I should be ‘simply accepting that state, however horrible it appears, as a state of perfection in that moment’? Through this accepting of the ‘moment’ I have extended compassion?

The choice isn’t black or white. There’s no saying that if you ‘simply accept’ a situation, you must retire to a virtual monastery and live a life of doing nothing about it. Accepting or not accepting a state as part of the perfection of the whole dictates nothing about any future actions. You can be completely allowing of What Is, yet still raise a voice that cries out for attention to pain that is being generated. You can offer nothing but a presence filled with a full and loving acceptance. So the real question is more : do you fully accept the person and the experience, which is to say ‘do you love them?’, or do you have reservations?

I have mentioned sexual abuse in my own past. It is very human to see such a traumatic event as child abuse and react with anger and a desire to punish. Yet such an action is rarely for the child, as much as justifications may say so. It’s for the performer of the action. The child rarely knows what’s happened. She knows is that an intense and painful experience has been etched upon her soul and that there is no way to undo this experience. There is no going back. In many ways, her life and her abuser is now intertwined; there is a bond that comes from the trauma.

The key here is that this experience is now a part of the child, including the link with the abuser. When there is no acceptance, the child feels there is no love for this part of her. There once was love for her, but now there is none, in her eyes. Therefore part of her is bad. This is the how the perception of a child works. When there is no love of the experience, resting in a complete allowing of What Is, then there is also no love of the people involved, which includes the child. It’s a reaction of the family which perpetuates the legacy of the abuse. In many ways, even unintentional denial of abuse is more painful in the long term than the actual abuse itself. It is a lack of compassion where a child expects it most.

The unfortunate aspect of abuse is that such a reaction is very normal. Parents may resist taking in the reality that a child has been abused. Their children are so dear to them and their identity that such damage is inconceivable. It may mean to them that they are ‘bad parents’, or that they have ‘failed’. Or they could simply refuse to see someone they love be part of something so awful. To their child, it simply feels like they’re now unlovable because their parents cannot accept them anymore.? When love that was once counted on disappears, a child makes inevitable conclusions about being unlovable.

In the future of the child, then, the part of them that is “unlovable” grows in such an atmosphere. If the abuse itself can’t be looked at, then all emotions stemming from that experience are also excluded. The child may be expected to “get over it” – the result is usually a conclusion that the pain is also unlovable, and therefore should be walled away. Sadness, reflexive body reactions, and boundaries may have the same conclusion. The part of the soul that is “unlovable” grows like a stain, because anything connected to the original experience of abuse cannot be given room without compassion. More and more filters, restrictions, and blocks appear to protect the world and the family from the “bad” parts of the Self. This is a natural outgrowth of not allowing the full nature of a child.

Compassion, based on a full allowing of all aspects of the abuse experience, communicates something much more simple : I see you completely, and I love you simply as you are. There is nothing needed more in healing than this.

We hope this helps you understand compassion more from looking at what happens where there is no acceptance.

Question: Why can’t parents accept such trauma? Why is so difficult to do so?

It is impossible to be accepting of trauma happening to others without accepting the possibility of it happening to you. This is empathy. Denying this possibility of pain and violence to yourself may temporarily create a sense of safety in your mind, but it also disconnects you from others who have this experience. You cut yourself off from the ability to give and receive support and warmth. This is why, for example, those who have been through sexual abuse and learned to love who they are, abuse included, offer the most empathy for others also with this experience. It doesn’t need to be this way; empathy comes from simply not resisting the experience and seeing its perfection.

Violence is part of humanity – it is part of the world we have collectively created. There is no escaping this. Denying the reality of suffering leads to an incredibly lack of resources to reacting appropriately to it.

A Tibetan Buddhist monk who lived in a monastery in India with no TV or news participated in an experiment. His brain waves were measured as he was shown videotapes of genocide and wartime rape. The scientists were amazed that his brain showed himself as deeply peaceful throughout. His response was that he was already fully aware of the possibility of this happening to others and himself, and that he felt incredible compassion to others because of this. Awareness creates compassion.

Awareness is not a theoretical thing. Knowing that extreme poverty occurs from an economic standpoint is very different from allowing the full experience of confinement and violence while not living in poverty. Awareness expands the spectrum of your experience – it does not limit it.

Of course action is a good thing in many cases. Mother Theresa and Gandhi lived lives of action based on compassion. It would not be loving to send a child back into an abusive situation, nor to avoid efforts to ensure such a traumatic event did not occur again. The question is, is this done out of compassion or as an attempt to push away the reality of the experience? Doing things out of obligation, assuaging guilt, or pushing away pain is not a place of deep compassion. Remember when you have felt others do things to ‘help’ you from this place.

The following parable in the quotes page illustrates a deeper level of compassion.

Once a master and a disciple were walking through a city and passed by a leper who was obviously close to starvation. The leper cried out loudly, in a voice full of tremendous suffering. They gave what they could and moved on.

After a short time, the disciple was flustered and still thinking of the leper. He was suffering as he gave to the leper, and still suffered. Watching his master throughout the encounter, there was no sign of suffering, no pangs whatsoever. Instead there was a deep peace and an enjoyment of the sun. Finally he asked his master, ‘Why are you not being affected by that tremendous suffering? Do you not care?’

The response was: ‘Of course I care. The only difference between me and you is that you hear them when they cry out, whereas I hear them always’.

What could be more compassionate than that level of awareness?

If you prefer a more personal, day to day story about compassion and a personal reaction, you may wish to see the previous article, ‘An allowing space‘ .

Let us speak to you today on the topic of compassion. Understand that when we use this term, we would like to refer to it as ‘an expression of Love’. Compassion is, in our perception, a melding of one’s energy with another’s. A combining to create something new that didn’t exist before. This new creation of energy as a combination of yours and another’s unites you, creates a bond between you. Over time, this act of creation between two people takes on a life of its own in some ways. But regardless of the length of time of the melding of energies, there does exist to varying degrees an understanding, awareness, acknowledgment, and acceptance of the state the other is in at that present moment. This acceptance for the state of another, whatever state that may be, is what we see as compassion.

This implies, of course, that there is no need to do anything on either side. Neither party involved in an act of compassion – or an experience of compassion – need do anything other than exist in that present moment. In other words, all that either party need do is simply allow the moment to take place. This, then, is acceptance.

As you might imagine, compassion manifests in many different ways; mainly in ways which you are unaware of the time. One may have compassion for anther person, for a group, or a community, or for an entire state of being that affects many people. Keep in mind that compassion is not one-sided. It is not something one does, or does not do, or has, or does not have. It is simply a state of allowing acceptance for a state of being to unfold and take place.

The concept commonly known today as ‘compassion’ connotes a lack of acceptance. It is implies that change is needed. There may be love there, but with that love is a lack of complete acceptance for the state that exists in that present moment. When one feels what is termed ‘compassion’ for, for instance, a legless man on a street in a third world country, typically one wishes to do something to aid them in their suffering. What we see as compassion, however, is simply accepting that state, however horrible it appears, as a state of perfection in that moment. Again, this creates an energy entity, a new creation of life itself, that combining with all the other energy entities in all the myriad acts of compassion in any given moment. It creates a domino effect comprised of Love. This domino effect of course triggers further acts of compassion.

Driving down the street you see an apparently homeless person digging in a trashcan. It’s a mere glance as your car speeds through the darkness to the light of your own warm home. This mere glance doesn’t cause you to wonder about where the person will sleep tonight, what they are eating or not eating, what their past may have been light. No, you simply see a scene and continue moving on in your own path. That is compassion.

Children manifest compassion naturally. What is termed ‘a child’s innocent curiosity about others’ is really a manifestation of compassion. Children are naturally curious about those who have a different appearance from their own. There is no judgment in this curiosity. It is simply an acknowledgment of What Is. That is compassion. A cat stalks a bird out in the garden. The cat’s whiskers twitch with anticipations. The bird hops about, blithely hunting for seeds, unaware of its imminent doom. That is compassion. For each acknowledges the perfection of the state the other is in.

Question: There are those who will interpret the above as an excuse not to have to do anything when faced with real pain such as starvation, violence, or social injustice. What’s the difference between this and indifference, if it looks the same in the world?

Indifference is an intentional act of non-acceptance. It’s a turning away, a resistance to What Is. It’s true that on the face of it, indifference appears much like true compassion. But the energetic difference is felt on all sides. Indifference does not feed into the domino effect of Love, for instance. However, when faced with real problems such as poverty, violence, starvation, one can have compassion and act at the same time. The action does not deny the acknowledgment of the perfection of that state. The action simply helps create new pathways along which that state of perfection can move. Each of you is moved to act when faced with certain triggering dilemmas. Each of you has his own benchmark that moves you from indifference to caring. In the wider perspective, however, again we state that there is no obligation to act. There is no need to do anything when faced with these problems, but we do see the entirety of human experience as perfection. Joy and violence exist within the same sphere of human experience, and to us, all human experience is an expression of Love. We hold you with compassion for we see you as perfect in every moment. That is not to say that we do not acknowledge the transformation you undergo all the time, but there is no need for change, no need to do anything other than simply exist. And even that is a matter of choice as well.

Question: What happens when you try to help others out of guilt or obligation? How is this different?

When one performs a charitable act based on a sense of rightness, duty, obligation, energetically this creates a void becomes there is an expectation of change that comes along with the act. The recipient is bewildered by this, perhaps not consciously, but feels a sense of expectation, yet has no direction to move. All of you have experienced what this feels like. An act of true compassion, on the other hand rides on acceptance and the energy remains in balance. There is a letting go of all expectations in the allowing of What Is that is compassion.

Do you have general questions you’d like to ask that you’d like to see channeling on? You’re welcome to use the Contact Form!

Thanks to Albert the Urban Monk,Wade of The Middle Way, and Kenton of Zen-Inspired Self Development for initiating this group writing project on the topic of compassion. I also recommend The Empowered Soul blog for their writing on this topic.

There is another post on this subject!

For further reading, please see Part 2 on Compassion!? Thank you!

NipTuck? : How does one know if they are being irrational or acting logically when something that seems to be unfair towards them drives them to anger and voicing such w/out insults but vehemently?

First of all, acting within the confines of reason is simply a straightjacket. Living this way, you will never avail yourself of the immense resources you have at all times in terms of intuition, emotional support, passion, and a pure sense of play. Life leaves a lot to the imagination, as it was meant to. Allow that to blossom. If you feel like being “irrational”, do so! In ways, of course, that do not restrict others to also blossom.

It’s taken me a long time to see that everything within me is undeniably a blessing to the world. Yes, everything, without exception. The same goes with you and everyone on earth. And yet people can perform actions that are extremely hurtful and cause immense sufferings. There is a paradox in this, of course, and seeing through it is essential for finding self-love.

Consider, then, two scenarios to help understand this dichotomy, which could arise from being close to a man who quite obviously is in a lot of pain. In the first case, he considers you the cause of his pain and frustration. He expresses this with rage and helplessness, making it clear that you’re the problem, and your denials cause him to react with more vehemence because he needs you to help get rid of all his inner problems. He keeps verbally attacking you until you either walk away or attack back. This quite obviously can cause suffering and distrust between you.

The second scenario is when the man is feeling great pain and frustration, some of which you triggered, but considers you the witness only. The rawness of the pain is shown directly to you, and helps you see that he too has a tender heart, can easily be hurt, and can believe in his own smallness. It could be shown indirectly, by screaming at pillows and launching attacks at them – which of course they’re less apt to believe than you! It could also be shown via prose, poetry, or even in song. But in the doing so, you are helped in seeing the innocence both of the other person and of yourself, for you too have these elements in you. The next time you encounter them in you it will flow easier, and this experience helps bring you closer together, even if you are not in a conventional relationship.

Now, there is no difference whatsoever in the pain and anger in the person between the two cases. The only difference is in the expression of it, the projection (or lack of it), and the vulnerability allowed. In the second case, there was no desire to avoid the intensity of the emotion whatsoever, and hence no projection. This is ultimately self-love, and helps bring love out to the world. It is not a rigid “I must face this and deal with it” attitude, which is an avoidance in itself, but a gentle allowing that has you as a witness.

So how to get there? Above all, be gentle with yourself. It’s good to have practice; if you have pain and hurt towards someone where there honestly isn’t enough trust to be vulnerable like this, take care of yourself and back away. Know that by not being a punching bag you are taking care of yourself, which is a part of self-love. Find a friend to be vulnerable about it first, or express it creatively by being vulnerable with yourself. Ultimately the more self-love you have to yourself about your own pain, the less tendency you will have to make it the fault of others.

NipTuck: More specifically, how does one handle the world in general?

Say, Insurance adjusters, office mates, peers, rude people who cut in front of you, try to cut you off in traffic… how does one react?

There is this paradigm it appears to me, where if one does exert some resistance (vocally) in others intrusions,they are considered trouble makers. Whereas if one does not say anything, one gets run over by the world at large.

? How does a person survive in this world? Allow others to run you over, or get angry. I speak up when people do this and then I feel guilty. It’s almost the survival of the fittest I feel. Everyone has become so narcissistic that I feel the continual need to avenge myself.

As someone vocal myself, I strongly notice when speaking up means I’m considered a “trouble maker”. So I take care of myself by stepping back if I feel if there is no openness whatsoever to anything opposed to preconceptions that exist. I have no problems speaking up, but there is no value in bashing needlessly against walls.

But really, the question is: what do you want? Do you want to be in the game of oneupmanship with others? Do you want to endlessly compete, in traffic and other things? Or do you simply want a feeling of peace and contentment in your life? If it’s the latter, then affirm that. Try to live that in traffic jams, in the office, with rude people. Different priorities bring different results.

There’s a saying in the Tao Te Ching that says “The sage does not compete with anyone, hence no one can compete with him.”. It applies here.

That said, even if you do desire well-being above everything else, of course there will be triggers. There will be people pissing you off. There will be people who require you to set firm boundaries. This is part of life, and expecting otherwise will lead to more upsets. But at the same time, there are ways to live in this world (and among such people) that are ultimately loving to yourself and others, even in trying circumstances.

Learning how isn’t a short term matter. If there are emotional minefields in your life, where you’re easily triggered, then it’s certain life won’t be peaceful immediately. However, it’s the direction of the next step that’s always most important, rather than the war zone you may find yourself in. Taking even one small step closer to peace may not feel like much at first, but it causes ripples both in yourself and those around you. Like I said above, everything inside ourselves is a gift. Allow it, value it, and try to find ways to let your honest self out – including honest emotions even if you think they are “negative” – in ways that do not make fault with other people . Blogging can be great, as you know! But above all, allow your feelings and reactions in such a way that doesn’t make anyone else wrong.

So yes, I do like questions that are on the flow of this blog. They’re very much welcome!  And if you like my writing, you’re welcome to share it in some way. Use the “email to a friend” link, send an email, put a link somewhere, anything is appreciated. Thank you for reading!