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Emotional-Behavioural Patterns

Emotional-behavioural patterns seem, on the face of it, to bypass some important aspects of human psychology. Where are the mental, the energetic, and specifically the physical and will forces? Emotional-behavioural patterns seem to imply some emotion or feeling that plugs directly into a demonstration of some kind and describes some predictable line of repetitive unfolding, sounding mechanistic and negative.

So far so good, in our understanding of emotional-behavioural patterns. However, there is a place for thinking, for energy, as well as for the corporeal and motivational. Although these patterns are not a specialty in human psychology, our observation of human behaviour, both inner and outer, leads us, fairly soon, to observe the repetitive nature of human beings. Outwardly, facial expressions, bodily gestures, speed of movement, sequence of behaviour, standard of behaviour expressing values and preoccupations, predispositions, prejudices, and level of awareness are enough to have us throwing up our arms in dismay: how, in what way, and by means of what is the human animal differentiated from any creature whose consciousness emanates from and is dominated by the base chakras of fear, survival, belonging, and acquisition?

Mostly, by far, human beings live their lives in a state of emergency, under conditions of survival, fearing the worst, expecting disaster, dreaming of terrible violence, poverty, paucity, anticipating the ravages of time, the onset of distress, calamity, and failure -- in short, imagining a tragedy of life a million times worse than what will, in all likelihood, ever happen to them.

What are we to make of this? Do we genuinely live in a state of desperation anything like the one we fear? Is our state of terror in any way equal to the threat actually posed? Does our level of anxiety in any way represent a balanced response to what might happen to us?

The fear of poverty, I have noticed, is usually more prevalent in people who have access to more than average funds. The fear of death in those who are not even ill, let alone terminally ill. The fear of loneliness (in old age, for example) more present in those who seem, on the face of it, more attractive prospects for companionship. What do we make of this? Fear masquerades as panic, paralysis, and hysteria, among other emotions, hides in dread, desperation, intimidation, and hesitancy, and is thinly disguised in worry, jitteriness, and uptightness. People today are shy, distraught, contracted, agitated, tense, and apprehensive, which are all signs of fear.

The former psychotherapist, now writer, and spiritual and social commentator, Stephanie Dowrick, points out that the fear of death is part of the infant's early experience, according to Melanie Klein. Dowrick goes on to say:

This is the fear of 'nothingness,' against which humankind has throughout history woven stories to promise 'somethingness.' Heaven, reincarnation, the sphere beyond... let me know through my body that I am alive, because it is certainly my body which will be unequivocally dead. (Stephanie Dowrick, Intimacy and Solitude, p.157)

She goes on to discuss sex, drinks at the bar, and human contact as ways to avoid fear, loneliness, feelings of unlovableness, and abandonment... but the ultimate is the avoidance of death. Fear of death conceals a deeper fear, as I have written about before:

To live -- to truly live -- there is really only one fear to overcome. Only one fear because it is the one which comprises all the others. That is the fear of death. Within this mighty fear is our denial of life, our avoidance of life, our lack of courage in life, and ultimately our fear of life. Fear of death is fear of life and now you sense what the journey of self-discovery has been all about. It is the shedding of fear in the form of our obsession with survival, our terror of not existing, our urge to rise out of the ground of being and realize ourselves as (and here is the great point of choice) our individual, separate self or as the true Self. (Richard Harvey, Moksha Dawn, p.42)

The mechanics of the emotional-behavioural patterns are as effective and predictable as they are proscriptive and confining... we fear our death; we fear our fear -- but our greatest fear is our fear of life:

Emotional-behavioural patterns are the automatic ways in which we react to life-automatic because that's how we avoid risk and insecurity. We fear fear! We fear the unexpected. We fear uncertainty. Just look at someone walking into any new environment, because it's easier to observe others -- but better still look at yourself. You plan what you will say, how you act, and how you will relate. You have a repertoire of possibility and safety. You react within the parameters of these anticipated circumstances and your rehearsed "responses." (Richard Harvey, "Liberation from Conditioning: An Interview on the Sacred Attention Therapy Project")

Life is so nailed down for most of us, there is no room for the surprising, the spontaneous --for an eruption of the sacred. With regard to "the emerging sacred reality" the author Ken Carey writes:

Fear has a small role to play in Creation. It functions as a warning system, advising each creature of behaviour that might cause biological damage. Its role is to protect the physical body. It was never meant to motivate human beings. Where fear is honored as a source motivation, consciousness diminishes... The Fall occurred when human attention turned to fear... (Ken Carey, Vision, P.9, my italics)

We have arrived at a simple truth: the fear that underlies our selling-out our humanity and enacting our lives through self-imposed emotional-behavioural patterning was never intended to be our mode of living, hiding behind the anachronistic need for protection, feeling "safe" through repressing the life-force.

Fear of death is fear of surrender to Infinity.

Learn to surrender, to exist at Infinity while alive, and fear of death dissolves.

Fear of death is fear of the Unknown.

So says Adi Da Samraj in The Eating Gorilla Comes in Peace. The unknown awaits the one who sheds his emotional-behavioural patterns. It is something wonderful -- what Rumi might call "a surprise of roses" -- but then it is utterly ordinary and quite mundane. Life itself flows very close to you and when you are released from your patterning, it pours through you like a great refreshing torrent.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10079716

7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Self Improvement by Stephen Covey

The Universal and the Particular

When you write or speak about personal growth you encounter two jostling rocks which you need to negotiate your way through. On the one hand, in your attempts to systematize or plot a course in order to give some form to the inner journey, you specify and simplify elements and sign posts. On the other hand, you must never lose sight of the individual's uniqueness. So for almost every generalization you recognize that what you propose as the rule to follow may just as easily be broken and prove to be the exception. Generalization versus uniqueness! Yet it is just this point that distinguishes authentic art and real creativity from mere daubing, hack art, and empty contrivance.

The great books, paintings, sculptures, and dramas tend to have this single point in common - they express the universal through the particular. The impersonal appears out of the personal! And this is how it should be, because in the deepest darkness of the human mystery known as the psyche an impersonal seam of truth lies awaiting the convulsions of the land of the soul and spirit, an earthquake of the power and magnitude of those that erupt and reveal mighty huge crystal caves that lay for thousands of years beneath the earth's surface.

Deep within us are the luminous, crystal caves of the soul. Reaching into them is a journey of daring. Not all receive the call to this adventure. But for those of us who are called there is an intense rightness about the path to the core of ourselves, an intense and growing realization that, without the discoveries the call yields, we remain unborn and denied the fresh vistas of life's treasures, which are so expansive, so deep, that our previous life pales in comparison.

It is as if we are waking up - and must wake up -- to some new dimension of life and, as with all calls to new life, the process begins with an invitation, a gateway, to change and transformation. This gateway is an archetype - recurring patterns in human behavior, universal symbols and motifs. But the reward demands a certain effort.

Let us draw on the myth of the heroic journey that essentially is comprised of these three elements: the call to adventure, the adventure with its trials and initiatory events, and finally the return with the gift for collective society. The journey requires willingness, receptivity, courage, resilience, faith, and surrender.

For many however, resistance or refusal to hear the call is the first challenge. For human beings are prone to delusions of safety and security. These delusions stand between them and the adventure of change and transformation. The more radical and great the adventure they are called to, the more resistance and struggle they are liable to experience. Psychologically this is known as attachment. Our first attachment is to our mother and the dynamics of the relationship and the narrative of how that evolved in our early lives comprises the familiar and "safe" holding pattern that is likely to preside over our lives.

We are shaken out of our attachment to our ordinary world. The life we have structured and scheduled around this familiarity is our comfort zone and our comfort zone can easily become the stagnant pond of our lives. We may fear the call to the unknown, hesitate at the risk involved, grow fearful of what we must give up and leave behind, feel apprehensive about what others might think of our reckless behavior, and falter at the perceived cost to ourselves and the life we have known. As we track back we can see the times in our lives when we were called to new adventure to change, to the new gateways of developing life. Perhaps a letter or an email, reading an inspiring passage in a book, or hearing a catalytic speaker who opens us up, the sight of a person we haven't met before, a challenging job offer or a promotion, the chance to move to another country... or of course starting therapy.

For those of us who persist in to the further reaches of personality work we encounter the ultimate call on the childhood egoic level that call is to finally release all.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/10083934

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