Michael Brown's At this point in our journey as a species, humanity is going through a profound evolutionary change. This is something that is taking place within us, but that is being reflected back to us by our external experiences. This evolutionary leap that we are presently undertaking involves a heightened level of consciousness, whereby we no longer perceive life as happening to us, but instead recognize that everything that occurs in our lives is sourced within us. Few on the planet presently realize that everything in our lives is something we are responsible for—that the causal point of the things that occur in our everyday experience isn’t outside of us in the actions of others, but within each of us. Becoming conscious of the causal point of our lives shifts our attention from blaming to taking responsibility. We go from reacting to what happens to us, to responding in a conscious and therefore creative and meaningful way. In other words, at this stage in our evolution, the universe is asking us to stand up and be counted, taking responsibility for our experience. It is asking us to show up as the magnificent individuals that we are. Instead of complaining about our circumstances and blaming others for them, when we become truly conscious, we not only take responsibility, but we also appreciate each aspect of our experience because it is what is opening us up to a much more fulfilling existence. There is no destination to life, only appreciation of an ongoing and eternal journey. We are not trying to get anywhere. Neither are we trying to fix ourselves, or make ourselves somehow different. Instead, we are for the first time becoming conscious of who we truly are, then learning to bring this awareness into our life experience. The causal point of all our experience lies in our emotional life. What Michael likes to call the “emotional body” is that part of us that is formed during the first seven years of life, before real thinking ability kicks in. During these early years, we are imprinted by the emotional condition of those who are responsible for us—our family and caregivers. Their emotional state overlays the essence of who we are, so that we learn to behave like them instead of growing up to be authentically ourselves. The teaching Michael presents in his book The Presence Process is in essence nothing new. It has always been here—for instance, in the words of Jesus, who said that unless we become as a little child again, we cannot enter the kingdom of God. In fact, Jesus says that unless we are “born again”—that is, go back to the beginning of our lives and make our whole experience conscious—we won’t even have any awareness of the kingdom. That is, we will not recognize the presence of God at work in every aspect of our lives. We’ll think we are just victims of circumstances. Only by going back to the beginning of our lives and recognizing who we are, in contrast to who our family and other caregivers taught us to grow up thinking we are, can we ever experience the wholeness that is our birthright. Only in this way can we finally recognize that the whole shebang in which we are immersed is the unfolding and manifesting of divine consciousness in incarnate form. In modern language, to become like a child again means we must go back to the first seven years of life, during which we were imprinted emotionally by our caregivers, and re-parent ourselves. Whatever we felt between the ages of one and seven shapes how we feel about ourselves today—and how we feel about others, and about life. It becomes our definition of what love is. Our job is to become aware of this emotional stew of fear, anger, and grief that’s residual from childhood, so that we bring it to consciousness. We become aware of the emotions felt long ago in the first years of life, and of how they drive our behavior still today. This is what re-parenting ourselves means. By being our own parent, brother, and sister, we bring to fruition in our lives the unconditional acceptance and love that is inherent within us but that has been layered over by all of our learned dysfunction. We are created in the image of the Creator—complete within ourselves—and have to learn to take responsibility for our lives so that we can bring this completeness into our daily experience. Only in this manner do we reenter the wholeness that is our birthright. As Michael shows in the DVD presentation AWAKENING TO INNOCENCE / INNER SENSE, our guide in achieving this course correction is the heart. This is because the heart is our bridge to the vibrational dimension of reality that is the nature of consciousness—the nature of what we call God. The language of the heart is felt-perception. This is the only language that can truly steer us in the right direction. It is not the same as our emotions, which we commonly mislabel our “feelings.” The emotional body has been distorted by our experience during our first seven years, and the heart is our guide to ending this dysfunction. Through felt-perception, the heart enables us to re-parent ourselves. We become our own father, mother, brother, sister, completing what was left incomplete in childhood so that we can enter into a full expression of our essential God-given wholeness—the very image and likeness of the divine Presence. When the heart is in charge, the vibrational realm flows through us, which empowers us to train ourselves to no longer react to the things that happen to us, but instead to respond consciously. The Presence Process gives us the tools to enable us to become our mother, our father, our brother, our sister. Empowered in this way, we stop seeking what we’re looking for in others. We don’t ask our partner to be our parent, brother, or sister. We don’t look to them to meet our needs. The process creates a conscious pathway back into the emotional body, which gives us an opportunity to return to the wholeness of the heart at its intersection with the vibrational. Our own wholeness then meets our needs, freeing us to connect with unconditional love, instead of demanding our partner be for us what only we can be for ourselves. Our ally in this journey is our external experience, which isn’t simply random but accurately mirrors for us what is truly going on in our dysfunctional emotional body—the patterns of inauthentic behavior developed during our first seven years. This is one of the most pivotal insights of The Presence Process. Our problem is, we don’t like turning the spotlight on ourselves. We want to blame “the other” for what we are experiencing. People gravitate toward spirituality because they want to become “happy.” They are looking for the elusive carrot on the end of a stick attached to their forehead. But there is no destination to arrive at, no spiritual goal, no external answer to our predicament. Instead, what we are offered is the chance to wake up and participate actively, responsibly, creatively in our lives, instead of living as victims to whom life chaotically “happens.” For consciousness to dawn, we have to get away from running from that which is hard in our lives, because that which is hard is only a reflection of the condition of our emotional body, the awareness of which we have been suppressing and sedating. If we are given this life and we try to run away from it, trying to find all kinds of “spiritual” paths to journey down and look for something else, we don’t evolve. The path is to reenter the heart, in response to the condition of our emotional body reflected back to us in what is happening in our lives. Only by becoming attuned to the heart can we begin adjusting our experience from the causal point of this experience. Only then are we truly evolving into consciousness. The journey isn’t about some kind of spiritual destination. It’s about allowing ourselves to feel life—to be present in it, awake, conscious so that we really experience everything. In this way we come alive to our vibrational awareness, which is an immortal consciousness. In other words, this is a breakthrough that has eternal consequences. The more we learn to appreciate ourselves and our lives, the more opportunity to experience the fullness of life we can be entrusted with. Appreciating what we have, what we have appreciates, in a journey that has no goal and no end but that is unfathomable and boundless. God-realization is an infinite journey. There is always more to appreciate! So the task is one of allowing consciousness to move fully into the physical world and anchoring it here. It is to be in this physical world, but to have the consciousness of an immortal being. The journey leads us to become more authentic, enabling us to honor who we are in each moment of our experience. Then, as Michael points out in THE RADIANCE OF INTIMACY, this empowers to become more intimate, because we can at last be truly present with someone, instead of it being about locking into the issues from each other’s unresolved childhood. The intimacy this makes possible gives us a life experience that’s far more awesome than we could ever imagine ourselves having! |