by Chris G Moon
Do not wrestle with this Dweller; it feeds on the aggression. Be still. Listen to its “truths” and be aware of the fear and pain it awakens in you. Accept it for what it is, and keep calling for the Truth. There is no place you can go where you could be inaccessible to the light of your own soul. As you trust life and keep choosing your heart, you will see that your doubt also serves the Truth, and its function is to strengthen your commitment to your soul’s purpose. Without fire, the potter cannot make a clay vessel suitable for water. Without the flames of doubt, your soul cannot turn you into a strong enough vessel to carry all its light.
Perhaps this is just a false belief of mine; so, as with everything written in this book, I ask you to examine the point I wish to make through the eyes of your heart to verify its validity. My point is that I do not believe your soul is necessarily concerned with the state of your relationship. I am not convinced that it cares whether you are with the “right” person, or how well you get along with each other, or if you are in a relationship at all. So when you get stuck in life and cannot find the strength or desire to move closer to your partner, don’t turn relationship into a religion, whereby you have to make it work or you will be punished as a sinner. Don’t trap yourself in the belief that you have to stay with this person for life. If you are not free to leave a relationship, then you are not free to stay either. In this case staying because you think it is “right” is choosing to sacrifice.
Your soul’s concern for you is that your choices be made in line with your purpose. If staying in your relationship will support your purpose, your soul will completely affirm any steps you take in that direction. If leaving is in line with your purpose, that is what your soul will encourage. Your heart and soul are not concerned with your personal motives for staying or going, but only with what will help you realize who you really are. As long as you are willing to accept your heart’s choices, what is truly best for you in your relationship situation will be made clear to you.
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45 She draws he parents to be approximately the same size as her little girls, but strangely, her brother—who is older—is for some reason drawn much smaller.
46 I was going through a hardship in a previous relationship when I asked a psychologist friend “Does this shit ever end?” My friend’s reply was, “From where I’m looking, it never ends. It gets better, and it gets worse. But it never ends.” After being married for some years I can attest to the truth of what he said, adding that, no matter what, it always gets better.
47 With the good guys being me and anyone who agreed with me.
48 Guess who was always right in my model.
49 As long as my partner did her half first.
50 Or bright neon lights, if you are more technologically inclined.
51 Don’t worry; there is a point where the experience of Assumed Inadequacy ends. It is just that we may have to go through a number of levels of it. How many levels varies from person to person.
52 I told a particularly disgruntled married friend of mine about this statistic, and she replied “Different rooms? I wish my husband and I were sleeping on different planets!”
53 Most of these are symptoms of what Dr. Chuck Spezzano has labeled the “Dead Zone” in his “Psychology of Vision” model.
54 I don’t just mean deadness around the sexual act, but deadness in physical touch, intimacy and one’s feelings and attitude towards sex.
55 In large quantities, as a matter of fact.
56 Karpman was involved with Transactional Analysis in the sixties when he made a basic design called the Drama Triangle.* It had a word on each corner: Victim, Persecutor, Rescuer. I changed it to suit the purposes of this book. * Stephen Karpman, “Script Drama Analysis.” Transactional Analysis Bulletin 4, 26 (April, 1968).
57 As a matter of fact, if you seemed happy while your team is losing, you would be severely chastised and probably thrown off the team for lack of “team spirit.”
58 After the coach gets through with them, that is.
59 Most people know that heat is not good for a swollen shoulder, but I was not interested in what was good for me; I wanted to be rescued from my pain immediately
60 I was glad I didn’t tell him about the muscle relaxants and Tylenol!
61 As best I can tell, it seems my physical pain was alerting me to the Victim beliefs in me and giving me the chance to recognize that they were not the Truth.
62 What do you expect from a guy who puts heat on a swollen shoulder?
63 It took me almost ten years to deal with the death of my parents responsibly; when I did finally grieve my loss in a loving way, the gifts were there, waiting for me to receive them.
64 And how about the possibility that, as a Rescuer trying to save you, the Victim, your only solution is to completely remove yourself from the situation, thus leaving your partner a victim of abandonment, or else the bitter Persecutor/Victim, blaming you for the misery you caused? Gets complicated, doesn’t it? Where do you think they got the ideas for all those soap operas?
65 “Innocent victim” is an oxymoron. We lost our innocence when we became victims.
66 Jiddu Krishnamurti, “Freedom from the Known.” Published by Krishnamurti Foundation Trust Limited, 1969.
67 He also gave us some of the answers to our history finals!
68 I want to point out here that I am not attacking the ego for its creation. Without it, I do not think Humanity would ever have the chance to attain self-awareness. We must give the Devil its due, as it were.
69 Noisy or irresponsible neighbors, people who don’t pay back loans, or someone who just plain bugs you all make for great material.
70 With the possible exception of line-ups at Disneyland rides during Easter Break.
71 Somewhere in the Old Testament of the Bible. I don’t know where you would find it—we never bothered to keep track of such details in my family.
72 Somewhere along the line somebody made “sin” an offence punishable by an eternity in hell. Whoever came up with that idea must have taken archery very seriously!
73 I once worked for a volunteer agency that visited old folks’ homes, mental institutes, and prisons. Many (but not all) of the volunteer workers I talked to admitted that they were volunteering out of a sense of obligation—not joy. Those that really enjoyed their work were always the liveliest, and kept the rest of us going.
74 His questioning had cost him and his family a great gift: genius develops in people not through what they know, but in the questions they ask.
75 Like my mortgage.
76 Did the guy who coined the name mortgage know something? Since morte means death in French, maybe when we have a mortgage we have a way to gauge our death.
77 More often than not this so-called “bad person” turns out to be an unusually gifted individual bound in the chains of fear and guilt. Go figure!
78 The sacrificer/indulger dynamic can be played out by one person. I remember during my early twenties, when I felt that my entire life was one huge sacrifice, I “needed” to get stoned or drunk almost every night or treat myself to a movie or a restaurant meal I could not really afford. When the burden was really big, I would partake in all four of the above indulgences. Because I was rarely doing what I wanted to do, and never really putting my heart into what I was doing, the resulting sacrifice demanded some form of compensation. Thus I would swing back and forth on the pendulum between sacrifice and indulgence.
79 Although we may fuse strongly to one parent, I believe we fuse to almost everyone around us in our early years, continuously moulding ourselves to meet their requirements.
80 Very often if you
leave a relationship because of fusion, you will inadvertently attract someone else with whom you will eventually experience the same smothering, trapped feelings. Sometimes it is necessary to leave because you stayed too long in the fusion trap; sometimes your leaving is just a temporary escape into independence.
81 For more information on fusion, I suggest “Passionate Marriage” by D. Schnarch, Henry Holt & Company, N.Y..
82 If you want to study one very fascinating perspective on the deadening of sexual energy through guilt, I strongly recommend Michael Washburn’s “Transpersonal Psychology from a Psychoanalytic Perspective,” published by the State University of New York (SUNY) Press.
83 Or, to put it more bluntly, if you’re “not getting any.”
84 It’s the same with crabs in a pail, but “Crab Effect” isn’t as catchy.
85 Of course the rest of him would die in the process, but that didn’t concern him at the time.
86 I have heard many clients express a firm belief that if they stayed in their relationship, they would have died—or else they would have killed their partner! Many who left with that attitude entered subsequent relationships with a greater degree of caution and mistrust. In effect, a part of them died by leaving their relationship before facing the issue that life was presenting to them.
87 For the sake of this understanding, I call any peaceful, harmonious, compassionate, encouraging, feeling, a loving feeling. A feeling that is uncaring, contractive, defensive, angry, numb, or depressed, a fear-based feeling.
88 In time I learned that my intention for facilitating workshops was greater than my doubts, and that this intention shone through with a grace that supports all sincere commitments. Thus, while I was distracted by my doubts, my soul was working through me, even using my pain as an offering to help others. People close to me knew of my inner torment and were actually inspired by my willingness to keep pushing through my doubts and doing my best to honour the Truth. It just goes to show you that trust is the alchemist’s stone that can turn leaden doubt to gold!
CHAPTER 5
REVELATION
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“Come with me, leave yesterday behind; and take a giant Step outside your mind!”
—The Monkees (A seventies rock band)
It has only been in the last ten years that I have occasionally had the good fortune to journey into the realm of Sacred Partnership. I admit that I do not live in that realm and frequently find myself turning to learn more lessons in Introspection, Disillusionment, and even Glamour.89 After bouncing back and forth among the levels, I found that even though the previous stages seem to be stepping stones leading in the direction of a true, conscious relationship, at any given time the path can take a sharp turn into another dimension of consciousness, delivering me directly to my destination. It’s like driving a car and following road signs that are directing you to New York City, when suddenly your car becomes a spaceship that lifts off into space, goes through a black hole, slingshots around a white sun, travels a million light years, and delivers you right into the heart of New York, New York. That is the best I can do to describe the experience of Revelation. Time-wise it is a very brief stage, but the effect it has on an individual’s life can be profound. Revelation is the experience that awaits you as you pass the threshold of the doubt that keeps you blinded to your true essence, and it is accessible at any time in your life, showing you that where you want to go is here.
Imagine a poverty-stricken man who receives a letter that informs him he just won twenty million dollars—but because his perception of himself as a poor man does not allow him to imagine such a thing is possible, he doubts what the message is saying. He then asks a friend to read it and his friend tells him he has won twenty million dollars. Still the man doubts what he is told. A week later he is lying in bed, about to fall asleep, when his eyes pop wide open, his brain starts racing, and he springs up with the realization that he is a millionaire. Suddenly his life is completely changed. In fact he was a millionaire a week ago, but even though the evidence was in his hand, in his mind he was just a poor old man. The transition from poverty to financial wealth took less than a second. This is the power of Revelation.
Revelation can be dramatic, or it can be subtle. It can fully enter your conscious awareness, or it can seep in without your complete knowledge of its presence. It is the force that creates the experience of learning, and allows all human beings to grow in consciousness. It has often been said that Revelations are the domain of the spirit; that they are impossible to earn, and unpredictable as to whom they will visit. I can never explain why I have been blessed with the few astounding epiphanies I have received—they certainly weren’t rewards for merit, I can tell you that! However, I am not so sure that Revelation is beyond human influence. To me, Revelation is simply my own soul making its presence known to me. When this occurs, what I thought to be true is seen in a clearer light, thereby revealing the falseness in my thinking, or refining the Truth within me.
In relationships, I have seen Revelation take place in three ways. The first is as the force that moves you from stage to stage, usually teaching you through pain and problems. The pain of Disillusionment reveals the false light of Glamour. Introspection reveals the source within you that creates the illusions and false concepts. The Revelation stage exposes the essential you that resides beyond your emptiness and your doubts. Soul Relationship reveals to you your true beloved. Thus every time we learn something of heartfelt value in our lives, we are experiencing Revelation.
The second way is through the previously mentioned epiphanies that seem to be completely out of your hands, and may or may not happen to you. If you do not know the means by which these Revelations occur, it is pointless to idly wait for one, but equally harmful to close the door on the possibility. You don’t have to wait on the dock for your ship to come in—but be ready when it does.
The third way gives you the power to choose Revelations without thinking that you must passively leave it up to the will of Heaven, or wait until you’ve fully graduated from the first three grades of “Relationship School.” One does not necessarily have to make one’s way from stage to stage in order to reach one’s Soul; there is always the opportunity to take a short cut through...
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THE QUANTUM TUNNEL
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“Dorothy... you’ve had the power to go home all along ... just click your heels together three times and say to yourself, ‘there’s no place like home... there’s no place like home, ... there’s no place like home.”
—The Wizard of Oz
When I was in high school, our chemistry book had an interesting theory about the ammonia molecule NH3. The nitrogen atom is located in the centre of a triangle formed by three hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen bonding is so strong that the nitrogen particle should be imprisoned there, but scientists observed that it would disappear and instantaneously reappear outside of the triangle. Then in another instant, it would return to the centre of the molecular triangle. At the time, they hypothesized that the nitrogen went through a “quantum tunnel” outside of the observable reality and came back again, but in a different location.90 I don’t know if they have updated that theory, but it is an adequate metaphor to describe Revelation.
No matter how trapped we feel by a situation, once we have set an intention to know unconditional love, we have access to a quantum tunnel that can deliver us directly into the embrace of Soul Partnership. It all depends on our readiness. As a result of our surrender, we switch out of “doing” mode into a position of receiving, which is the key element to all conscious relationships. We can receive guidance, inspiration, and vision, any one of which can teleport us instantaneously out of any trap.
One example of the quantum tunnel effect comes from a time in my marriage when Su Mei an
d I were engaged in a Power Struggle, wondering once again if we would ever get through, or if we should start exploring separation before we completely stopped liking each other. I suddenly remembered my friend asking me one day if I wanted to know the secret to becoming abundant in my life. When I admitted that I did, he told me, “The secret is, you already are.” It reminded me of another statement from the movie Jonathon Livingston Seagull. It said something to this effect: If you want to get somewhere as fast as possible, the greatest speed is being there.
From my miserable little spot in the Power Struggle I considered the wisdom of these words and decided to test them out. Where I wanted to be with my wife was in love; where I found myself was in the grips of a fight. Imagine if I could take one breath and be in love right away. I asked myself “if I were experiencing a loving partnership with Su Mei right now, how would it look?” From somewhere inside me came the idea to perform some service for my wife, which I immediately followed before I had time to think about whether I felt like it or not. She had told me before how much she enjoyed eating a certain dish I cooked, so I went directly to the kitchen. While making the meal for her I felt different, but only so long as I focused on the “giving” in the act. Then I asked myself, if I were deeply in love with Su Mei right now, what would I be feeling? I became more aware of a warmth in my heart, and a lighter, clearer sense in my head. It felt pretty good. Then I asked, if I were to see Su Mei as my beloved, how would she look to me? My mind was filled with an image of her as the beautiful, wise wife and friend I know her to be. Giving space for these loving experiences to grow soon created a closer bond to her, and the previous tension between the two of us gave way to a much more tender feeling. We had a great dinner together, something that seemed impossible an hour before. By my willingness to imagine “being there,” my Soul’s presence could be revealed.91