Radiant Joy Brilliant Love

by Clinton Callahan

  MAP OF LOW DRAMA DETECTOR

  It is simple but not easy to detect an approaching low drama. If there is resentment, blaming, complaining, justifying, proving yourself right, or making someone else wrong, it is low drama. The “not easy” part is that low drama is tempting Gremlin food. If anyone thinks there is a problem and it is someone else's fault, or the fault of circumstances, then it is low drama. Your low drama detector can sense a low drama 100 yards away, and will warn you with a red flashing light on your right shoulder: “Beep! Beep! Beep! Low drama approaching! Proceed with extreme caution! Do not get hooked! Use your “sword of clarity” to make distinctions so you can take responsible actions!”

  Begin building your low drama detector by remembering the three roles played out in low drama: victim, persecutor, and rescuer. The three roles of low drama are excruciatingly obvious to detect. Ordinarily we do not see the roles because before now we did not have the Map of Low Drama to refer to. We thought that real things were happening and that this was just how life is. Now that we have the Map of Low Drama we can observe low dramas from the outside.

  Construct your low drama detector by wiring in a whole-body sensor connected to a large warning lamp mounted onto your chest. The sensor glows red and screams “Beep! Beep! Beep!” whenever it detects a low drama. An approaching low drama is simple to detect. If there is resentment, victimhood, blaming, complaining, justifying, proving yourself right, or making someone else wrong, it is low drama. If a person thinks there is a problem and the problem is someone else’s fault or the fault of circumstances, then it is guaranteed to be low drama.

  Initially your low drama detector is not fine-tuned.

  Three days after you make a low drama your low drama detector will trigger for the first time, “Beep! Beep! Beep!” and announce, “You have been sleeping for three days! Three days ago you were in a low drama!” And you think, “Oh, yeah! That’s what that was! Sure! Three days ago I whipped up a low drama. Hmmmm.”

  If you increase detection sensitivity then soon your low drama detector will go off again, “Beep! Beep! Beep! This morning you were in a low drama!” And you think, “Oh my God! Yes! That is what this glum residue is around here! I had a low drama this morning. Hmmmm.”

  If you increase the sensitivity even further, then almost before you know it your low drama detector will go, “Beep! Beep! Beep! Hey buddy! That was just now a low drama that you did!” And you think, “No! No! Really? That was a low drama? But I was right! I was justified! They were wrong! They were hurting me! I had to take action… Whoa! That’s right! That was a low drama! This is amazing! I was just then doing low drama and I did not even realize it. I did it again. Inconceivable!”

  This tuning procedure may take weeks, or even months. With further careful adjustments to increase sensitivity your low drama detector will go, “Beep! Beep! Beep! This here right now is a low drama. You are in a low drama now. This is it. Happening right now.” There won’t be anything that you can do about it right then. It is too late. You are already in it. But from inside the low drama you can observe it happening. You can observe your part, your payoff, your Gremlin in ecstasy devouring the possibility of love happening and replacing it with grief, separation, and the temporary satisfaction of conquering your enemy through subterfuge. At this point clarity is your key. Do not shy away from seeing what you are really doing to other people, to your children, to your mate. The details of your Shadow World pleasures instruct you exactly where to make your next detector refinements.

  Finally, one day, after months of effort to avoid getting hit on the side of the head and knocked unconscious by low drama, your detector does its true job, “Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Wake up! Wake up! That right there in front of you is about to be a low drama. You are now being seriously invited to do low drama. That is it! Right there! That! Do you see it coming? It is the tone of voice. That ‘hidden purpose’ – the Shadow Principles of Gremlin. It is those vectors of intention. The spin on the words. The attitude. You can feel them coming and you are about ready to dish them out yourself. Do you want to play or not?”

  In that instant you get your first chance to do something other than low drama. Before then, for your entire life, you never had that choice; the Box’s whole low drama operation was mechanical and automatic. You were unavoidably sucked into each low drama and your life juice was inexorably consumed. Now the precious blessing of your low drama detector becomes more obvious. After months of gaining more and more awareness about your particular style of suffering you finally have a choice about whether or not do create low drama. That choice gives you your life juice back. Now – what are you going to do about it?

  “Don’t Go There”

  One possibility for taking action in the instant that you recognize low drama is to reflexively reach into your tool belt and grab a little wooden picket sign that says: don’t go there! Lean forward and ram that sign into the road directly between you and the low drama. Then obey the sign. Do not go there. Go somewhere else. Completely avoid considering anything more about the low drama. Put your intention and your attention on something else entirely, on something that you would prefer to use your energy to create. Put your body in motion on another road. Go toward your writing project; or remember the love you have for your children; imagine tending the vegetables in your garden, or cooking a fine meal for your mate; focus on developing your self-respect; on breathing fine radiant joy; on something else, anything else, and then go there instead. There, you have just bypassed your first low drama! Good. Now, can you do it again in five minutes? And once more this afternoon?

  Most of us arrange a steady diet of low drama for our Gremlin, who has its own particular feeding schedule. Some Gremlins need one big feeding frenzy each month for four or five days. Some Gremlins need one low drama a week for a whole day. Some Gremlins are snackers, nibbling here and there all day long, trading little nasty jokes and hurtful comments with other Gremlins to keep their appetites satisfied. Low drama is about feeding Gremlins – not about solving problems, resolving conflicts or changing anything. Low drama is not about change. If you want something to change the key is you taking responsibility. As Ken Windes, the leader of my first training used to say, “Responsibility is the procedure for change.”

  You should be warned that, if you succeed in initializing your low drama detector so that it can sniff out low dramas approaching from 100 yards away, you will be avoiding Low dramas that used to be normal for you. If you avoid even one low drama, the energy that would have been consumed during that low drama is conserved in your body. It will not take long before the conserved energy builds up an uncomfortable charge of reserve energy that must be dealt with in ways you are not accustomed to. You used to consume that energy in low dramas. Now you must figure out something else to do with it. Having more energy in your system than the Box is structured to tolerate can feel quite intense. If you start doing experiments that permit you to avoid low drama you should be prepared to do simultaneous experiments in tolerating the intensity of having more energy in your system than your Box considers to be normal.

  The Box has little tolerance for managing more than its usual amount of energy. The added intensity is extremely irritating and our Box makes immediate efforts to go back to its familiar state. The Box has many creative ways to instantly burn off excess energy. Sneaking a few low dramas here and there is especially effective, but the Box has other favorites. You know them: over-indulging in alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, sugary greasy junk food, drugs, chocolate, Internet sex, gambling, flirting, videos, exercise, work, shopping, or, at the other extreme, insufficient sleep, insufficient water, lack of exercise, lack of good food, lack of good company, and so on. Learning to hold greater levels of energy may involve lifestyle changes that you never expected to have the discipline to make. Now, all of a sudden, discipline is easier than suffering the familiar but painful consequences of unconscious Box mechanisms. Isn’t life fascinating?

  In practic
al terms, the energy conserved by sidestepping low dramas is then available for making responsible moves toward being your destiny Principles in action. This answers the question, “What do I do instead of creating low drama?” Three options will be explored in the next sections: 1. Say yes or say no, 2. Ask for what you want, and 3. Make boundaries.

  SECTION 6-U

  Say Yes or Say No

  Ordinary human relationship is rife with fuzziness, confusion, loopholes, delays, excuses, misdirection, miscommunication, withhold, sloppiness and a clear commitment to non-commitment. Having myriads of non-strict flexi-rules is neither good nor bad; it is how it is in ordinary human relationship. The further you refine the quality of relationship – from ordinary to extraordinary to Archetypal – the fewer the rules and the more strictly they apply. But, at the level of ordinary human relationship, forgetfulness, gray zones, and deception are the norms.

  Fuzziness and non-commitment are easily created by never finally deciding yes or no. Without making decisions you cannot be blamed. You are not at risk. You never really fail, nor do you ever really succeed. Mediocrity prevails. This is ordinary human relationship. The kids say, “Dad can I have an ice cream?” and your answer is, “Let me check with your mother. We’ll see. I don’t know how soon dinner will be ready. When was the last time you had ice cream? What about having some fruit? I think the ice cream store might even be closed already.” And so on. Without a yes or no decision the consequences are more vague than the known consequences of a clear decision. We imagine that by not deciding we avoid suffering, when, in fact, not deciding is its own form of suffering.

  Simply making up your mind to make up your mind is not going to help you make yes or no decisions and permit you to enter extraordinary human relationship. The hesitation to make yes or no decisions does not come from the mind floundering in a lack of information or too much information. The hindrance to making yes or no decisions comes from the heart and has to do with our reticence to feel. Decisions intimately involve feelings in ways that we may not have studied before.

  On the surface, making a yes or no decision appears to involve making distinctions, creating clarity, and then taking action. Distinguishing, clarifying and acting all involve energetic “sword work” that is empowered by feeling angry. Not that expressing the distinction, clarity or action must be with anger, but that by their nature making distinctions, creating clarity and taking action are motivated by Archetypal anger energy. What this means is that if it is not viscerally okay for you to feel and use the energy of anger because of old childhood survival decisions to disempower yourself, then distinguishing, discernment, clarification and action are not going to happen naturally for you.

  But, a deeper level of feelings – a confrontation with grief – is involved with the consequences of decision-making. This is because in every circumstance there are practically an unlimited number of options available to choose from. If you decide for one of those options you are simultaneously deciding against ninety-nine million other options. That is, if you choose to give life to one possibility you are at the same time killing ninety-nine million other possibilities, forever, for all time. These unmade choices are now really dead. It is not possible to choose them anymore. The passing of the ninety-nine million possibilities into irretrievable oblivion must be grieved. So, if it is not perfectly okay for you to feel deep authentic sadness over the death of all the options you’ve decided against whenever you’ve make a decision, then you will unconsciously avoid making decisions about anything just to avoid feeling sad.

  Start with making a decision to grant yourself permission to let anger course through your veins for the rest of your life no matter what the consequences. We are so conditioned to regard anger as bad or destructive or hurtful that it takes some experimenting to realize that anger is simply energy for moving us forward to accomplish things. Experiment with feeling angry and using the anger to empower your discernment, insight, speaking and gestures with passion. Use anger energy to practice responding immediately to yes or no questions with a simple, unexplained, unjustified, undefended yes or no. Then do not waver, regardless of what additional considerations the Box supplies you with. No wiggling.

  At the same time make an additional decision to grant yourself permission to let the feeling of sadness flow through your veins, again, for the rest of your life, no matter what the consequences. Be careful not to mix your sadness with your anger. As shown in the Map of Mixing Feelings, integrating your sadness with your anger will automatically produce the experience of depression. To avoid feeling depressed, or to exit depression, just be clear about what you are feeling. First feel anger, then feel sadness, then feel anger again if you want, never mixing the two together. Quantize your feelings. You are angry about some things, and also sad about the same things or sad about different things. Anger and sadness come from completely different Archetypal domains. Experientially mixing them together confuses and disempowers one of your primary resources of energy and wisdom. No wonder you feel depressed! Just do not mix the two feelings together. Your new willingness to feel sad gives you the ability to let unchosen alternatives pass you by with respectfulness and without drowning in nostalgia. Daily life in the flesh involves life and death consequences. When you choose the veal parmesan, you pass up the chicken cacciatore and the spinach lasagna. You cause many possibilities to die by choosing one possibility to enliven. That is how it is. Letting the waiter or your wife choose for you does not change the consequences of your decision one iota.

  When the man asks his woman a yes or no question, like, “Do you want to go to the beach this weekend?” and she takes off on a tangent, like, “We only have three hundred in the bank and your mother wants to come over for lunch on Sunday,” he can avoid getting hooked if he does not go into automatic reaction mode. After all, it is just the Box speaking. He can keep listening and not say anything until there is a slight pause. Then he can say, “Those are answers to the questions, ‘How much money do we have in the bank?’ and ‘What does my mother want to do on Sunday?’ I did not ask those questions. I asked, ‘Do you want to go to the beach this weekend?’” If she says yes then he can say, “I have a hundred and fifty in my wallet, enough for gas for the camper and a splendid two day picnic. I will call my mother and explain that we won’t be here this weekend. Are there any other details to handle?” All of a sudden, almost miraculously, this couple is in extraordinary human relationship.

  SECTION 6-V

  Ask For What You Want

  It is true that all human beings are psychic. It is also true that in our modern world we are trained to ignore our nonlinear magical knacks because they do not fit into scientific linear explanations. Although we are modern and scientific, we continue to assume that our partner, our children, our neighbors or our colleagues know what we want of them without our having to ask for it. We somehow expect people to know what we like or don’t like, what we need or don’t need, what we want or don’t want. We don’t even stop to consider how absurd this is.

  For example, if as your husband rubs your back he moves his hand round and round in the same place, it may quickly irritate you to the point of anger. You can pull away, go to sleep, and avoid letting him ever rub your back again, because, you conclude, he obviously does not know how to rub backs! Do that with cooking the eggs, dressing the kids, wrapping birthday presents, and singing Christmas carols, and you have successfully erased five areas in which you could instead experience wonderful and stimulating intimacies with your husband.

  Relationships do not die from lack of love; relationships die from a lack of intimacy. The basis of intimacy is letting yourself be known. But we are Westerners. We are individualists whose identity includes being independent and wanting to accomplish our life on our own. We are not familiar with revealing and communicating about intimacies. It is too frightening to reveal who we really are, what we really want, what is working for us or not working for us. It is too frightening to reveal such i
ntimacies about ourselves because even if we take the risk of exposing ourselves so heartfully, there is no guarantee that we will be accepted as we are. We have so much experience being rejected, or worse yet being ridiculed, teased or taken advantage of, that we decided long ago to never again be so naïve as to reveal ourselves to such a degree. Instead, we develop stealth skills for manipulating, strategizing, bargaining, sneaking roundabout, or whining to get what we want, or forgetting all niceties and just taking what we want by force. Our automatic strategies leap into action whenever they are triggered and we do not understand why we do not get closer to our partners and friends.

  If it is not okay for us to feel fear, it will never be okay for us to reveal who we are by asking directly for what we want. Revealing ourselves is always risky. Fear of being hurt again is natural. If we cannot allow ourselves to experience fear, then we can never be so direct as to simply ask for what we want.

  Let’s return to the back-rubbing example. Why is the man rubbing the woman’s back in the first place? The greatest pleasure for a man is pleasing a woman. If the woman can help her man please her, then he will be pleased even more, and so will she. This is a “Winning Happening” game. He is pleased when she is pleased. She is pleased when he is pleased. It all revolves around the woman being okay with feeling afraid while she gives feedback, “Slower and down to the right, James. Ah, that’s better. A little farther left. Use your fingernails just a little. Ah, yes. Like that. Not too rough. Up more now. Slower. Mmmmmm.” He might say no. He might feel insulted about being told what to do. He might not be able to understand or change for awhile. He might reject her vulnerable request and there is a chance that she will not get what she wants. Yes, that is a risk. But if she does not ask then it is almost certain that she will not get it.