Radiant Joy Brilliant Love

by Clinton Callahan

  Learning to ask for what we want is central to self-knowledge. We might be assuming that first we have to know what we want before we ask for what we want. Then, instead of saying “I want to have a clearer picture of what I want, can you help me?,” we try to figure out what we want by ourselves and we ask nothing. This may satisfy the Box just fine because the Box may not be so interested in having us know what we want. If we know what we want we might ask for it and get it. But what we want might not be the same as what the Box wants. If we drop the requirement that we must know before we ask, we can simply start by asking for what we want, ignoring the Box’s sense of confusion, doubt, or insecurity that it uses as a defense against change. We can ask for what we want on our way to getting clear about what we want: “I want to find out what I want.” “I want to find out who I am.” “I want to be more effective without focusing on Box-centric goals to achieve.” “I want a sense of the mysterious in every day life.” Through rapid learning we will quickly learn what we really want.

  The point is that we want what we want and we don’t want what we don’t want. End of story. There is no reason, no explanation, and no justification necessary. Certain things matter to us because they matter to us. Period. What matters to us is built into our destiny at birth. I want world peace. I want to make a film of two guys discovering Possibility Management. I want a Soft-Skills Invention Think Tank designed like a galaxy instead of a hierarchy. I want an international conflict resolution team trained in Possibility Management. I want a Possibility Mediator certification program. I want to write and publish five more books. I want to write and make three films. I want the third biggest building in every village (after the church and the town hall) to be a Temple of Evolution. I want no country to be bigger than 1500 people so that human diversity explodes on planet Earth and no more big wars can happen. I want to outlaw franchises and television stations that can broadcast farther than twenty-five miles. I want to reinvent schooling by certifying Possibility Trainers to transform teachers into trainers who provide children with expanding Boxes rather than staying educators who merely cram more contents into children’s Boxes. I want to enliven a truly confrontive and dangerous rite of passage from childhood to adulthood in Western cultures so men and women can grow up and take responsibility for creating what truly matters to them and therefore have a better chance to enter the domains of extraordinary human relationship and Archetypal Relationship.

  What difference does it make that I want these things? If we do not acknowledge to ourselves specifically what we want, then we manipulate ourselves into not wanting what we want, or perhaps we manipulate ourselves into wanting what society wants for us, what our parents want for us, or what some company’s marketing department wants for us. There are enough forces out there trying to manipulate us already. We do not need to manipulate ourselves too. Amazingly, we are so accustomed to being manipulated that some of us put energy into manipulating ourselves into doing what we really want to do! Like we want to take a world trip and travel with a backpack through Southeast Asia, so we manipulate ourselves to get up each morning and drudge off to work to earn the money for plane tickets, instead of working in the present delight of already fulfilling our dream by earning the money, or taking off with almost no money and creating legal and fun ways to make the money we need along the way.

  MAP OF RAPID LEARNING

  Rapid learning is a four-step process that incorporates feedback from your environment as exact instructions for what to change in order to get better results. In rapid learning, feedback is neutral, and there are only two kinds of feedback you can receive: Go! or Beep! Go! means keep going. Beep! means stop; it is not working. Shift means change something and then try again. In rapid learning, feedback is gold. The problem is that we went to school and learned that Beeps! are bad. If we still think Beeps! are bad then we avoid taking risks. If we do receive a Beep! we go directly into the swamp where voices suck away our ability to learn.

  Even if we cannot now have what we want, even if what we want is impossible and we can never have what we want, we can still admit to ourselves what we want and stop lying to ourselves about it. We may know that because of our discipline or because of our practice we would never choose to go back to college and earn a Ph.D., for example, but to not acknowledge that there is a part of ourselves that wants to do that is self-deception. There is enough deception from outside sources working on us already; we do not need to deceive ourselves in addition. We also don’t have to be reasonable about what we want. After all, asking for what you want may change the circumstances so that you can actually get what you want!

  A friend of mine heard of an exciting conference that he wanted to attend in Johannesburg. He told his office colleagues about the conference and they all wanted to go too. The problem, they all lamented, was that the company had no budget to pay for travel costs. My friend suddenly picked up the phone and dialed another colleague in the sales department. “Hey Jack!” he said. “There is this conference in Johannesburg that I want to attend. It would be great for our company. Could I use your extra frequent flyer miles to go?” My friend asked for what he wanted. Jack said yes. The call took less than one minute. He went to the conference. His two colleagues did not. Ask for what you want.

  One of the things we are most afraid to ask for is help. Consider these questions. If we could avoid letting the fear of asking for help stop us from asking for help, is there any problem we could not face? If all the help of everybody around us were available just for the asking, is there anything we could not accomplish? Try this experiment: without hesitating, for no reason, ask for the help that you want.

  Appropriately asking for help – meaning, the asking of help that is inspired by true necessity, not for manipulative, attention-getting or low drama purposes – places you as a “job” on someone else’s workbench. Someone who is in the position of being able to provide objective help benefits from helping. If a trainer had no one to train, how could the trainer fulfill his or her destiny? One hand washes the other. Do not get the idea that asking for help implies that you are weak. Think of the last time you helped someone in a meaningful way. A friend of mine was asked by a movie star to be-with her alone in her last days as she died from cancer. Being well-used could make any experience the best time of your life.

  SECTION 6-W

  Make Boundaries

  Your body instantly tells you when a boundary needs to be made, exactly where, exactly with whom, and exactly about what. Your body knows. The conflict that interferes with hearing your body’s boundary messages is that the carrier wave of boundary information is the feeling of anger. If it is not okay for you to consciously experience feeling angry, then all your body’s boundary messages will be repressed right along with the anger.

  The natural response to anger is to stop the circumstances causing the anger. Instead, we have been trained to stop the anger. As an experiment, consider this question: If it were okay for you to feel angry and to use your anger to make decisions, make boundaries, and make changes, what decisions, boundaries and changes would you make? Seriously engaging this question would produce answers in writing.

  There are two ways to use the energy and information of anger to make changes. One changes conditions outside of yourself and involves making boundaries. The other uses anger to change conditions inside of yourself and involves making distinctions. Making distinctions is a higher technology than making boundaries. Distinctions are smoother, less confrontive, more elegant, and conserve more energy than boundaries. But making distinctions is also subtler, more delicate, and less obvious. Let’s start with the work of making boundaries.

  A boundary functions like an energetic wall. Examples of boundaries include: No! Stop! Stay away! Yes! I want that! We made an agreement already about this and I want you to keep the agreement! This arrangement is not okay! Never do that behavior again! Only do it this way! That is none of your business! This is my life! I will not do that! Leave me
alone! And so on. As simple as they may seem, it may be a surprise to learn how inadequate most of us are when it comes to making boundaries. In training after training I observe that most people cannot even effectively say, “No!”

  Boundaries supplement our ability to trust – an important contribution to the functional life of an adult man or woman. If you do not yet have the skill of making boundaries, it will be helpful to develop and exercise that skill. Not trusting another person is actually you not trusting your own ability to take care of yourself around that person. It does not have to do with them. It has to do with you. You could find valid reasons to distrust anyone. With instant access to your ability to make boundaries, however, you can take care of yourself without having to depend on the separation created by distrusting your ability to take care of yourself. Enlivening your ability to make boundaries lets you expand the group of people you consider to be your friends. You don’t have to remain so guarded when you realize that a wider variety of characters could enrich your life experience. You could be friends with Harley Davidson bikers, with that gossipy neighbor woman, with those arrogant colleagues in the other department, with the lonely kid next door, with your own kids for that matter. As you begin making boundaries with your own children you will feel the separation between you and them decreasing, which is the opposite of what we would expect. We separate ourselves from our children as a way to protect ourselves, but then we are separate from our own children. When we can take care of ourselves by making boundaries, when our “sword of clarity” is always at the ready, then we can get quite close to people and still feel safe.

  Because boundaries ride on the energy of anger, and because we tend to block consciously feeling our anger, we may not sense the need to make a boundary until the “enemy” is at our castle gates. You may be surprised to know that you have the capacity to detect your anger when it arises in your body at only 1-3 percent of its maximum Archetypal intensity. Such a small amount of anger is still anger. Even at 1-3 percent, anger can still inform us of the need for attention toward a specific concern, or perhaps even alert us to the possibility of making a pre-emptive boundary. If we do not detect that we are angry until it surpasses 80-percent intensity, we could suddenly go from 0 to 80 percent and be ready to explode! The condition has gone from green to red without any noticeable yellow in between. Then we may be shocked and leap into full-attack mode instead of maturely and wisely taking care of ourselves when our anger was first awakened. In this case we simply waited too long to make the boundary. Waiting is naïve. Letting the enemy cross our entire yard and enter our foyer before we even notice that they are there is a result of self-induced sleep. To make a shift, experiment with lowering your anger sensitivity bar. Practice becoming conscious of what you are feeling when the feeling intensity level rises up to only about 3 percent. Such experiments may reveal that you feel more often and feel more deeply than you previously realized. Lowering your sensitivity limit gives you earlier warnings so that you can make boundaries at the border of your frontier, at the white picket fence on the street rather than at your bedroom door where a boundary would be far less believable and effective. By increasing your sensitivity toward your feeling you can be more intelligent, relational and compassionate with your boundaries because you do not have to enter full-attack mode before making them.

  The evolution of your boundary making relates to Phase 1 and Phase 2 of feelings-work. As you recall, Phase 1 is simply to feel. Learning to consciously feel is a huge step. In the beginning of feelings-work you may find that some of your first long-overdue boundaries are accompanied by hollering at the top of your lungs in 100-percent rage. The results may be somewhat embarrassing if you make a boundary with 100-percent rage where only 30 percent would have been sufficient. But don’t worry. It only takes a few months of use to develop your feelings from the immature stage to the mature stage, where you need them as an Adult. Making a few sloppy boundaries along the way is far more important than continuing to make no boundaries at all. Other people will get over it. You will be forgiven.

  In Phase 2 of feelings-work when you have your feelings back and your voice back, then you can be more precise about the ways in which you establish boundaries. In Phase 2 the feeling tells you that a boundary is needed, but no shouting or screaming is necessary. Merely stating a boundary in all four of your bodies with full clarity about what is happening and what you are doing is sufficient. Even though you are not shouting you still represent the potential to shout, or scream, or cry, in any necessary instant. Your potential to instantly escalate, if needed, is enough to make and hold almost any boundary.

  Your first boundaries may establish a full barrier: a thick impenetrable concrete wall, 30-feet tall, topped with broken glass and barbed wire, spotlights and machine guns, and electrified with 10,000 volts. Nobody could get through such a boundary, so you are definitely protected. As you continue to practice making boundaries with Phase 2 you may observe that while boundaries do form a barrier, that barrier also blocks relationship. You do not get much communication through a concrete wall. Over time you might experiment with making finer boundaries – less solid barriers. Your new boundaries prove to be just as effective but will require fewer energetic materials in their construction, and less attention to maintain. Continue making subtle boundaries and you will soon discover the second way to make changes: clarity. Clarity often protects you from harm even better than a boundary.

  Clarity

  Clarity is produced by making distinctions. Distinction-making causes changes in your own Box. Creating solutions and possibilities by making changes in your own Box has a distinctly different effect than trying to make changes in the Boxes of others. Distinctions let you perceive the set-up of things so that you can work with them or move around them on purpose. Without clarity you can’t help but clumsily smash around.

  When a distinction rearranges your Box to create clarity, it is like having been severely nearsighted and suddenly putting on corrective eyeglasses. What a difference! Just a moment before the area spread out in front of you was a smear of colored fuzziness. Now, with the glasses on, you can distinguish tables, chairs, sleeping dogs, kids’ roller-skates and all sorts of obstacles to be avoided. If a person who could naturally see watched their friend “deliberately” kick the sleeping dog and get bitten day after day, they might not comprehend their friend’s crazy behavior. As soon as the seeing person understood that it is possible for a person to be shortsighted, they might stop scolding their friend and instead help them get to the eye doctor.

  The same is true in relationship. The first step in correcting bothersome communication and relationship experiences is to imagine that you may be encountering obstacles that you cannot yet see.

  Ordinary human relationship is the automatic result of bumbling around with immature or uneducated perceptions about what is going on in your relationships. Extraordinary human relationship is the automatic result of relating to human beings through clarity about feelings, listening, speaking, communications, centers, ego states, problem ownership, low dramas, making boundaries, and so on.

  Using clarity produces different results from using boundaries. For example, if you go to a dance party and want to protect yourself you can sit in a corner behind a boundary of chairs or refuse to dance so no one can cut in and flirt with your partner. Or, you can make distinctions to gain clarity about what is going on at the party. Then, with clarity, you can go ahead and dance, move your own feet out of the way, flirt with beautiful and ugly strangers, explore different dimensions of conversation, and in general take care of yourself while still interacting. Clarity does not guarantee that no one will step on your toes. But neither does sitting in the corner behind a wall of chairs.

  A boundary at its most basic level specifies limits and blocks energy flow. A distinction, on the other hand, specifies limits yet still allows energy to flow. A boundary is like a wall between neighbors. A distinction is more like a picket fence between neigh
bors that defines the property line but still permits you to chat with each other on Saturday mornings.

  To evolve your boundary-defined relationships into distinction-defined relationships, start by examining the boundaries you are holding. Sense into your connections with other people and determine: Who are you holding boundaries with? Why do you feel the need to maintain these boundaries? Who are you thinking the other person is? Are you assuming that they are their Box or that they are an unknowable mystery? Why are you granting sentience to the mechanical actions of their Box? How could you evolve your boundaries into distinctions that give you and your relationships more possibility? How could you stay in relationship with a person and not get hit by the mechanical manifestations of their Box? Sense into any boundaries that other people are holding with you. Who holds them? Why are other people feeling like they must keep boundaries up with you? Ask yourself (or them) how they could gain the clarity that frees them from their boundaries with you and gives them distinctions instead?

  Make Boundaries with Children

  When a mother and father build a family culture for their children to live in, the parents’ model for what a family culture should look like comes from their own childhood family experiences. The process of inventing family culture is, in general, unconscious and automatic. Parents do not often consider, “Hmmm, do you think we should have Hanukkah / Christmas / Ramadan / Chinese New Year, or not? What about not having television or newspapers in our house? Should the kids be born at home and sleep in our bed with us for their first five or six years? How many rooms do the children need anyway? Let’s skip the ‘big house with everybody in their own room’ fantasy and spend our time and money traveling more and being together in nature, shall we?” Although these are real options available for every parent to choose from, for the most part we abandon our creative freedom to the machinations of mass media and predominant cultural precedents. We then suffer the broad consequences of passively choosing without recognizing our responsibility for having made a choice in the first place.