Cogitating about it all afterward, I was reminded of Fritz Perls (gestalt therapist), known for his social rudeness that tended to be passed off as a sign of his great height of vision.  His attitude seemed to be that we deserved his rudeness, as we obviously lived at a lesser height of vision or we would, what?, have no questions?

We were at dinner one night and I asked a neutral, noninflammatory, question.  He looked at me, looked down, blinked a couple of times, and then let loose on me, apparently as my punishment for asking anything of him.  However, in his looking down and blinking, I saw he was reaching for his rudeness response, his way of reasserting that this was his way of being known.

No doubt a brilliant man, he was the originator of the ‘hot seat’ position in therapy, designed to be a no-excuses spotlight where only the down and dirty Truth could be told.  His famous book is In and Out of the Garbage Pail.

However, socially he was a disaster, apparently addicted to his personality (his false ego (see Glossary)) which included, and leading with, this rudeness schtick.  Due to his unavailability, how could anyone be friends with him?  He must have been very lonely.

Through it all, I learned some things from him that have stayed with me and been very useful in my own journey of learning and understanding.  Glad to have been in his circle of influence for a moment; glad the glare of his attention on me was soon over.

We love pointing fingers and blaming outside ourselves for the conditions, internal/external, that we have created.  Being successful at doing this ensures that we never have to grow up, never have to risk giving our gift to the world, never have to Do anything.  (Reference the Be/Do/Have triangle.  First we Be some way that we desire, then we Do the appropriate actions for that state of Being, then we automatically Have the appropriate material goods/states of mind for that state of Being.)

It’s easy to forget the definition of Child is one who is not responsible for the consequences of its actions, and the definition of Adult is one who IS responsible  FOR the consequences of their actions, and responsible TO others for those consequences.

Staying in Victim and Blame also ensures that we are never grounded in our bodies, our feet are never on the planet, and we are suspended in space – we are Lost in Space.  It’s also a way to ensure we are never in present time.  As Seth says about a gazillion times in his book, The Nature of Personal Reality, “The point of power is in the present.”  Therefore, no present/presence and NO power.

Reaching for our personal power is pointless if we’re spaced out in mid-air.  First we have to land and put our foot on the ground, get grounded and, hopefully, somewhat centered.  As Werner used to say, “Put your sole in the room and you WILL get it!”

The thing to get is this:  We ARE our life.  The world is a magic mirror; what is projected out from us returns to us as our life, individually and collectively.

Get it?  Got it?  Good!

* The word ‘responsible’ means the ability to respond in present time.  It DOES NOT mean fault/shame/blame.  In fact, true Responsibility cannot exist in a context that includes fault/shame/blame.

Copyright © Sandra Dean 2010

Now, so the rumor went, there was a very smart man named Vern Black who lived on this planet in an Emerald City called San Francisco.  This man was so smart that he had hung out with, and learned a whole lot from, another very smart man named Werner Earhardt.  Now this Werner guy had read a thing or two and thought about it a lot and then, while crossing a long golden bridge, had a visitation of great wisdom.  Out of this great visitation of wisdom, this Werner person constructed a large and complicated teaching of exercises on how the unhappy people on this planet could untie the knots in their self-awareness so they could release themselves from their unhappiness and find liberation in peace, joy, and creativity.

Now, to get back to this Vern Black person, having had a few visitations of wisdom himself,

he wanted to help out AND he wanted to do it his way.  So he talked to a few angels and other such beings and devised a series of questions designed to assist individual unhappy persons to untie those knots of unhappiness in their minds and step out into the fullness of their potential lives.

Having done that, he wrote a book about it and in the very beginning of the book made up a little story, sort of like this little story, and he called it The Flat Tire Story.

The Flat Tire Story, like all good stories, is full of action and drama, lots of Sturm und Drang, and then little pockets of peace where the person falls back in the grass and looks up at the sky and takes several deep breaths before getting up and going on.  It’s a story of initiations and movement inward and outward toward the place of Knowing relationship with the One Being Who made up all of this in the first place.

Now, imagine this.  There are 16 of you, of us, who have gathered together in a room in the center of which is a large, oval-shaped table and around which are exactly 16 chairs.  We sit down and open envelopes that are on the table in front of each chair.  These envelopes contain instructions on how to conduct this meeting.  We are, each of us and in a certain order, to go around the table and tell our personal story about an event that just recently happened to each of us.

That event was that each of us recently were driving down a road somewhere and suddenly experienced a flat tire on our vehicle.  Now, something that you will notice very soon is that each person has a unique and sometimes strange-sounding name.  Remember that names are magical in that they often reveal deep and hidden truths.

And so we begin:

The first person speaks up and says his name is Disloyalty #6, and his nickname is Pretence. What he says is that he was driving down the road in his car, minding his own business, when suddenly Bang!  His car swerved across the road and almost hit several people and stationary objects before he could stop.  So he stopped and thought to himself, “Oh, one more thing to show me that I’m useless, this car is obviously useless and has betrayed my trust, I wish I were dead, I’m such a failure.  Everything happens to me and I’m pissed about it.  I can’t do anything right.  I don’t know why anyone hangs out with me and I wish I could just roll up into a ball and go hide somewhere until I die!”

Wow!  All the rest of us try to remember this is just one person’s experience.  We take a deep collective breath, and gesture for the next person to speak.

She says her name is Disloyalty #5 and she doesn’t have the energy to have a story about her flat tire event.  She says she was overwhelmed by the whole thing and just lay down on the car seat and waited for something to happen.  Eventually someone came along, pried her out of the car and took care of things.  She doesn’t remember what happened or even the name of the person who helped her out.

As we lift out heads up from the table, where some of us have dozed off, we dredge up enough hope to be able to listen to the next story.

The next guy says his name is Disloyalty #4 and he is just in a state of grief that this thing happened to him and to his car.  He knows he’s not good enough to have a good car, and he shouldn’t ever have even tried to have something nice ‘cause something always happens to him to spoil it all, and it’s all just hopeless.

We begin to wonder just how many of us are we going to have to dump in the loony bin after this?  But we go on and let the next person speak.

She says her name is Disloyalty #3 and she is numb with sympathy that these terrible events have happened to these other nice people and it happened to her, too.  She says she wants to reach out and help them and hopes someone will reach out and help her, too.  She is, she says, yearning to help these others somehow get out of the trap of their extreme unhappiness and she hopes they can help her, too.  She’s lonely and tired of being alone.

How much more of this can we take?  We don’t know, but we’re here for a purpose and we go on to the next person.

The next guy is sitting in his chair quivering and sweating.  He says his name is Disloyalty #2 and that he’s remembering the shock of the flat tire and feeling the fear, despair, and terror all over again.  He looks around the room as if something is going to come at him and he wants to see it in time to duck.  He talks about how his life is a constant series of threats, and he’s always looking for ways to protect himself, and he doesn’t know how much longer he can tolerate all the fear, dread, and worry.

We don’t know how long WE can tolerate it either, but somehow find the superhuman strength to hear another story.

This woman’s name is Disloyalty #1 and says all you losers are just pathetic.  Her flat tire event was the worst.  She was seriously inconvenienced, she was humiliated when help arrived, she had a little tantrum as she thought about the people who hate her and probably did something to make this happen.  Her car wasn’t in the garage the night before and anyone could have come in the night and done something nasty to hurt her.

Well, this is a change, and why do we all feel a little better now?  We also noticed that all the persons who have spoken have very similar names and the first guy had the nickname Pretence.  What, we wonder, is that all about?

We question these six and discover that each of them has the nickname Pretence because their so-called friends (better known to them as their persecutors) have told each of them at one time or another, and many times over the course of time, that their attitude and point of view of life is that they are Pretending that life is the shits, and that there ARE other choices.

After the hubbub dies down a bit, we choose to go on.  Things are starting to get a little bit interesting.

The next guy says his name is Adversary #2 and he hates his name and he hates us.  Just the sight of us puts him into a rage.  He is MUCH better than the rest of us, believes he was invited here in order to straighten us out, and that we’ll all be better off when he’s acknowledged to be in charge.  When his tire went flat, he got out and cursed and kicked his car, and then went out into the road and forced the next car to stop or hit him, telling that driver he had to help and exactly how to go about it.  When that driver objected, A #2 got very close and threatened to harm him.  Under threat, the 2^nd driver changed the tire and got the hell out of Dodge as soon as he could.

Well!  We’re all in a swivet now and wondering if we’re going to get out of this room alive!

The next woman says her name is Adversary #1, she is in shock and pain just listening to the lot of us, does anyone have a Percodan, ‘cause she’s just outraged at this attack on her.  Her experience of her flat tire is that it was as if she just suddenly slammed against an invisible wall that had been put up to stop her, there were lots of reasons why her tire was defective – but she had to keep it to herself for lots of reasons only she herself knew, and WHERE is that Percodan?

Gosh!  Things are heating up and getting even MORE interesting.  We’re on the edges of our seats now waiting for the next chapter.

The next chapter is a kind of weak-looking guy who sort of blends in with the wall.  He says his name is Uncertainty and when his car tire blew he was so confused and frustrated because he just didn’t know what to do.  Being stopped meant he missed a new job interview and it was all so annoying.  He was just exasperated with the whole thing!  He had worked so hard to set up the interview, and now this!  He remembers that someone came up to him as he stood on the road and suggested something, he doesn’t remember what now.  He was just going in circles!  Should he go this way, should he do that?  He just couldn’t decide!

The energy around the table has definitely taken a new direction and we need a break.  We get up and walk around, have some coffee or tea and then, with renewed intention, sit down again.

The next woman to speak said her name was Detriment/Responsible.  She says it’s just as well that her tire blew.  She had been going to a party, but the way things are going for her right now she knows she would have just made another mess, another glass of red wine spilled on the hostess’s white carpet, tripping and falling into the chip dip, you name it she’s done it and is getting tired of it.  She’s so disappointed in herself.  She really wants to make more friends, and for some crazy reason people keep inviting her to their events, but it always ends up with her drowning in guilt and embarrassment and then having to clean it up with her friends.  She feels there is something wrong with her and it’s all just so boring!  Why can’t she just say NO! when people invite her?

Well, we’re pretty confused now!  What is going on with this woman?  We don’t know and don’t know how to be of any assistance to her, so we go on to the next story.

The man seated in the next chair says his name is Non-Existence.  He says he doesn’t know why anyone here is making a fuss about anything.  It was the same when he was out driving, enjoying the beautiful day and just humming along.  When his tire went out, it was a little bump that got his attention for a moment, but he used his cell phone to call AAA, and they came out pretty quickly and changed his tire.  While he was waiting he just looked around, still enjoying Nature and the beautiful day.  The tire fixed, he went on his way.

At this, we’re all looking around at each other, scratching our heads.  We have gone from life-threatening despair to life-threatening rage, to a complete neutrality of affect.  What a ride!

The next woman speaks up and says her name is Danger.  She’s not sure why her name is Danger, because she doesn’t think she’s dangerous or in danger.  She says when the tire on her car went out, that she cautiously got out of her car to look at the tire, wondered and was a little curious about why it had happened, and a little concerned that everything would be all right.  She, too, called AAA and watched closely while the repair person fixed her tire.  It was all so interesting!

Then a man speaks up saying his name is Emergency.  He looks alert and ready for anything.  He reports that when his tire went blap he thought it was pretty funny.  He got out and looked at the tire to see what it looked like and just laughed out loud.  He had changed lots of tires and thought it was great that he was having this little adventure on the road.  He had all the tools he needed and knew how to use them.  It was just enough of a challenge that he felt great satisfaction when he was done.  He smiles around the room at us, inviting us all to share in the fun of his little adventure.

A woman says that her name is Normal.   She sits back, at her ease, to tell her story.  Driving along, admiring all that was around her, she was a little surprised when suddenly her tire blew, but she calmly got off the road and went out to fix the tire.  While doing so, her attention went to the manufacture of the tire, how well it was made and how well these tires served her and everyone who drove in a car.  She smiled at how safe she felt with so much skill and high intention that went into every aspect of manufacturing cars.  As she drove off, she thought about how comfortable and convenient cars are and how much their use enhances several aspects of so many people’s lives.

A man’s voice rings out, vibrant and compelling.  He says his name is Abundance.  He is finding all our stories utterly enchanting and is so glad to be here with us.  When his car’s tire went out, he says, he almost didn’t notice it as he was in such a state of bliss at the beauty of everything around him.  He did finally notice there was some kind of imbalance happening with the car and stopped to get out to look.  As he stood there looking down at his blown tire, he felt so grateful that this tire’s life had served him so well.  As he was changing the tire, his thoughts were about how much he cherished his car and the roads, and the opportunity to go anywhere at any time.

The light in the room is getting pretty bright now.  There is one more person who hasn’t spoken.

She says her name is Empower/Source.  She appears serene and looks at us all with compassion and a quiet joy.  Her story of her tire’s expiration goes like this:  She knows she was driving in her car because of what happened.  Her trust and faith in Life usually allows her to float in her consciousness a little above the physical car so she has a wider view and sense of freedom.  When the tire went out, she noticed the car was wobbling a little, so she completely entered her body and got out to see what was what.  Another car immediately stopped right next to her and the driver asked her to allow him to be of assistance to her.  She could see this person was trustworthy, and so agreed.  He was very focused and efficient and completed the job quickly.  She loved watching him work and thanked him deeply and sent him her blessings.  As he left and she went on with her journey, she thought of the little game of interaction that had just occurred and went into an even higher level of ecstasy and joy, and her commitment to Life deepened and widened.  She was ready for the next game in Life, the next action, and the next opportunity to radiate compassion and joy.

Well, this is the end of our story.  As with all good stories about love it has a happy ending.  And since it’s also a story of a journey, it shows us the road behind and an idea of the road ahead.

As one of those handsome movie cowboys used to sing, “Happy trails to you, until we meet again.”

Copyright © Sandra Dean 2010

If not, you are ‘in integrity’ in the sense that your body parts are still attached to each other – in that sense you are ‘whole.’  What a relief!

In another sense, the real sense, Integrity is a matter of degree and can be exactly calibrated.

It’s not possible to be at the top of your game of life without being consciously aware of your actual level of integrity and how to manage the various elements that contribute or detract from that.

We will start with Agreements.

We will go on to Trust.

We will learn the distinction between an Agreement and Commitment.

We will then study the Integrity Tone Scale.

All this won’t be fun.  It is highly likely to piss you off.

However, this can be for you a next step in growing up and in giving up your victim act.  This is what is likely to piss you off, to learn that growing up isn’t something that is inflicted on you by circumstances from the so-called ‘outside world’ and which can, you might be hoping, be avoided forever.  Rather, it is a series of interactive steps that, when you know, you can determine exactly for yourself.

The definition of Child is, “A person unable to be responsible for the consequences of their actions.”

The definition of Adult is, “A person able to be responsible for the consequences of their actions.”

Responsible means “able to respond in present time.”

Is that you?  First of all, are you in present time?  The probability is that you’re not.  Most likely you are carrying around and occupying your past upsets, ‘trying’ to change them.  Or else you might be dreaming of the supposed future, ‘trying’ to operate the Law of Attraction while vibrating from the thoughts and feelings of what you don’t want.

Good luck with that.

‘Try’ is to not Do.

__________Yoda

In other words, we humans tend to stay stuck in the mud puddle of the mundane, forever spinning the tires of our vehicle of Embodied Life.

In Transformation work are several words used with different meanings than are usually understood.  There are also a few words that have been created in order to fill in gaps in meaning in English vocabulary.  Below are the ones I am at present able to remember.

Adult:  A human who, through having learned the effects of the consequences of choices made, is able to be responsible for her/him self.

Child:  A human who, lacking the knowledge of the consequences of choices made, is unable to be responsible for her/him self.

Agreement:  Essentially a business contract with equal sides; that is, each side or person is both a contractor and a contractee.  Agreements are the only means of communication between humans.  There is currently a popular confusion between the concepts of Agreement and Commitment.  To erase this confusion, see Commitment below.

There are only three responses anyone can have to an agreement already made:  1) Keep it; 2) Change it; 3) Break it.

The consequences of each response is:

1)     When you keep an agreement, there is increased trust in yourself to keep your word and your sense of self-esteem is increased.  Also, the other party now has an increased ability to trust your word, as well.  As a consequence of that increased trust in your word, your reputation in the world (think collective consciousness) ratchets upward.

2)     Changing an agreement shows respect for oneself and for the other(s) involved in the agreement.  Again, the result is increased self-esteem all around and your increased reputation in the world.

3)     Breaking an agreement breaks the relationship with the other person(s) involved in the agreement.  An agreement is a bridge between one and another.  Breaking the agreement blows up the bridge.  The cure for this is to build another bridge by a) acknowledging that the agreement was broken; and 2) offering an amendment to the other as a token of self-responsibility and an asking for forgiveness.

An aside here:  the first time there is an observed behavior in another is an indication that that pattern exists as a possibility in the future.  The second time the behavior is observed indicates the probability the pattern will repeat in the future.  The third time the behavior is observed is a statement that this particular behavior WILL repeat in future as it is an ingrained pattern and there will be no escaping it.  When this occurs, tell the truth to yourself and carefully choose your response.  Your truth and response may very well include exiting stage left ASAP.

Belief:  A thought, repeated again and again, eventually forming blocks to perception and comforting walls of limitation.  Beliefs are the boxes in which we live and from which we construct our lives.

By the bye, there IS no ‘out of the box’, as there is no way to operate outside our beliefs.  There simply is no There there.  What happens when pushed ‘out of the box’ is that suddenly our beliefs expand and our box, sometimes suddenly, becomes larger.

Balance:  When things are completely in balance, any issue regarding the ‘thing’ disappears and the ‘issue’ returns to the originating information in the Flow.

When we are unhappy, in order to project away from our unhappiness, we select aspects of the original information and put a wobbly spin on them through imbalanced thinking.  The aspects, now out of balance, separate out of the Flow as a kind of particulate matter.  The information stays in pieces that way until we release the imbalance through some kind of letting go, at which point the pieces rejoin the whole.

They talk about this in Christian Science as the way in which when healing occurs; the whatever-it-was that apparently required healing simply disappears as if it never was.  As, in Truth, it never did; we just made it so for a time.

We humans constantly forget this.  It’s probably too simple and too profound for the RM to handle.  So, having forgotten it again, when we relearn this it always appears as a revelation.

The Universal Solvent is Forgiveness, which is a special function of Love.  It’s also the Key to the Kingdom, and we, each of us, hold this key in our hands and hearts.

This is the whole of the Law of Healing.

Commitment:  Commitment is NOT a fancy, false-ego-stroking synonym for Agreement.  An agreement is a tit-for-tat contract between two or more parties.  Commitment is a State of Being.

Decide:  Idea-cide, or the death of ideas.  As with genocide, it’s the attempt to kill off all possibilities but one.  Then we can be dramatic and say, “I just don’t have any other choice.”

Description:  Description is the ability to make unemotional (meaning ‘unattached’) observations and to describe those observations.

Discrimination:  Out of the smorgasbord of choices available here in 3D, we get to choose freely.  Also freely chosen, although perhaps invisible at the moment, are the resulting consequences of any given choice.  Through experience, and over time, we learn to choose with more discrimination those consequences that suit us better than other choices/consequences.  In this way we learn to customize our life experiences according to our desired outcomes.

Discrimination is not a synonym for Judgment.  Judgment projects opinions/points of view out into the world and pins them on something/someone that we perceive as outside one’s self.  Discrimination is able to say, “This is this.”, and “That is that.”  Another term for this ability is Description.  Discrimination is, eventually, able to use Description, understanding there is a consequence to every choice.

Ego:  a term adopted from psychology that is often incorrectly used, or is used in a too-inclusive manner, resulting in confusion.  ‘Ego’ basically means Identity and has been re-translated in Transformation work to refer to two distinctly different functions of the larger human Mind.  (By the way, Mind and Ego are not synonymous.  Pay attention here.)

False Ego:  This is what I call the Johnny One Note, the Me-Me-Me-Me-Me.  Its Purpose is to establish, “What’s in it for me?”

True Ego:  Our connection to the Divine, this is the I Am.  Its Mission is to ask, “How may I serve?”

Overview of the Egos:  In everything that we do, or think about doing, both the Johnny One Note and the I Am come along – neither can be eliminated nor should be.  They, together, provide balance for us here in 3D as humans.  And, just a reminder, we are the local site of a warm animal in partnership with the Divine.  We walk in two worlds, Left Right, Left Right, to create and hold the balance.

Judgment: A process of consciously or semi-consciously declaring something ‘good’ or ‘bad.’  The good or bad is in the eye of the beholder and not innately so.  The Reactive Mind (RM) serves up good/bad judgment as a response to its evaluation that something perceived is good for our survival or bad for our survival.  That’s it.

Listen Up:  In magic(k) work there are two basic precepts:  First, Control your thought.  Second, Guard your tongue.  Our reality is created by the thoughts that we think and the words out of our mouths.  Simple?  Yes.  Easy?  No.  It’s a discipline and a treatise for another place and time but, to repeat, Listen Up.

One of the things we learn from the Course in Miracles is that objects/situations/people come into form with no meaning tags attached.  The human individual, as a meaning-making machine, will supply her/his own meaning to each and every object/situation/person encountered or heard about existing somewhere other than in the immediate field of observation.

Why then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

_______Shakespeare

This form of the function of Judgment is a filter of perception that, if absent, would allow us to see with clear eyes and minds, and to stay in Present Time.  This function of Judgment throws us either into the past (usually) or into the future.   That’s the purpose for which the RM uses Judgment, to keep us out of Present Time in which we would be present to the encounter.

When in Present Time, a state seldom achieved for most of us most of the time, we are in the flow of energy/communication that occurs naturally between Self and Other.  When we are in Present Time we are naturally in this flow.  We then naturally and automatically experience peace, bliss, wonder, and love.

This is our natural state of Being.

Guilt:  The currency with which we pay in order to do what we are going to do anyway.  Also see Guilt/Pleasure in articles for January 2010.

Healing:  When things are completely in balance, any issue regarding the ‘thing’ disappears and the ‘issue’ returns to the originating information in the Flow.  When we are unhappy, in order to project away from our unhappiness, we select aspects of the original information and put a wobbly spin on them through imbalanced thinking.  The aspects, now out of balance, separate out of the Flow as a kind of particulate matter.  The information stays in pieces that way until we release the imbalance through some kind of letting go, at which point the pieces rejoin the whole.

They talk about this in Christian Science as the way in which when healing occurs, the whatever-it-was that apparently required healing simply disappears as if it never was.  As, in Truth, it never did; we just made it so for a time.

We humans constantly forget this.  It’s probably too simple and too profound for the RM to handle.  So, having forgotten it again, when we relearn this it always appears as a revelation.

The Universal Solvent is Forgiveness, which is a special function of Love.  It’s also the Key to the Kingdom, and we, each of us, hold this key in our hands and hearts.

This is the whole of the Law of Healing.

Mind:  All elements and degrees of consciousness.  Part of the New Thought statement is, “There is One Mind.  That Mind is God.”

Objective/Subjective:  All experience, by definition, is the experience of the subject of the experience and therefore ‘subjective.’  Objective means the experience of an individual from a detached (not emotionally attached to outcome) point of view.  Subjective means the experience of an individual from an attached (emotionally concerned with outcome) point of view.

Point of View:  One’s life experience is focused through the lens of a Point of View (PoV).  PoV in its natural state is fluid and changes with any movement from here to there, either externally (using the body) or internally (through having another thought about the thing observed).

PoV is inevitable.  There’s always a place where we stand and from which point we view whatever we are looking at or for.

However, there is a danger here in that any given PoV can seem to be the Only One, or the Only Right One.  That is, the PoV of all Right Thinkers.  Here PoV intersects with one’s set of Beliefs.  That is, one’s individual PoV, already a filter on Reality (whatever that is!) is again filtered through a Belief System, so that PoV can appear(!) to be The Way Things Are, and that’s that.  Whoo!  Can we all pronounce Mind Control?

Reactive Mind:  a part of the human level of Mind used by the False Ego.  The RM only knows survival of the body of the warm animal that we are.  This is the extent of its perception.  The RM also has no sense of humor, meaning it takes everything literally and therefore has no balanced perception within itself.

Responsible:  Able to respond in Present Time.

Self-Esteem:  The measure of the individual’s Self Love, which determines everything else in the experience of life.

Speculation:  When you know, you know.  Until then, it’s all speculation.  Speculation is all fantasy and projection of something within the personal self onto another person or situation.

Sandra Dean Copyright (c) 2010 All Rights Reserved