Sometimes when you’re in polite conversation, especially if you’re hosting others, it’s hard to get a thought across succinctly, even coherently. Decorum requires us to meter our speech and allow others a chance to express their thoughts and it’s a situation become tongue torture trap that I often find myself in, and after the fact find myself thinking, “Damn! I mean to say something else!” I know it happens to everyone, but I feel like it happens to me on the daily and I know half of that is bandwidth and processor overload and the other part is human psychology.
Recently we had a little chat on the podcast that briefly mentioned Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and I failed to answer the question as to what it actually is, my mind knew but froze and I didn’t want to lose the thread of the thought I was already on and just gave a quick not so quick witted answer so that I didn’t lose the current point in the download queue on my outdated 1966 personal CPU! I mentioned the hierarchy in passing because I was reminded of it due to the fact that we were going to speak about people feeling negativity all around them, feeling unsettled by it and its number two on the hierarchy. The point of the hierarchy being that you can tell where a person’s thinking is and possibly what their motivations are, by using the hierarchy to discern what need on the graph is driving their emotions currently. Let me include the chart so you can see what I’m referencing here:
So, as you can see in the chart, this is a great tool for discerning where a person is in their progress to becoming a stable human, where their actions are coming from and how stable the psyche is. It has been my experience that many of us waiver a great deal between levels three & four on the chart, only ever briefly accessing level five intermittently because we’re worried about losing either our self-esteem, or the love of someone else, hurting ourselves financially, or causing ourselves physical pain. I know the traps all to well, in business you find yourself too often, monitoring your facial expressions and minding your tongue because you can’t afford to let slip the hounds of war that might cost you customers and you get stuck there until you realize that what others are hoping for, looking for, is authenticity in others. Then there’s the guilt of having not been true to who you are and the realization that you have to work your way back up that mountain again.
So, what do you do? You start to work the steps just like you would with any other process, be that magically, or steps for the completion of project at work,
a must come before b,
b must come before c and so on.
You know what you need to be stable in life, once you have those, the aim is to work on what it takes to make you feel whole, or Self-Actualized. This framework applies especially to those of us who claim to work magic in any form, because the outcome we all seek if we’re earnest in our seeking, is Transcendence which is the final level beyond the basic hierarchy of needs, you transcend once you no longer need, once you are content to be unattached, untethered from fear, worry, stress, anxiety, material things, etcetera.
My personal objective is to transcend without forgetting this life and all the lessons, to store it away so as not to have to repeat this process again, to truly become next level free. Is that possible? I believe so. Sometimes right before meditation and often right before sleep, I get a slide show of faces, all different races, and genders, from young to old, they often come at me like a kaleidoscope constantly shifting positions, fading from view, reappearing, popping in and out in a sort of this was your life trailer. I’m pretty sure that all these faces were me at different intersections in history, I heard this in my dreams, I went to bed thinking of the faces and determined to dream about them to find out who they are and why in the world they kept haunting me, appearing to me at the edge of meditation or sleep and I was told in the dreaming world, that they were all me, previous incarnations of me, and since I know that we are all made from the dust of stars and we’re all recycled over and over again ad infinitum, this made perfect sense to me. So, I began to notice later on that we, these faces and I, shared physical traits and I often meet them in dreaming world. I try hard to listen to what those versions of me have to say about current situations. I have to constantly work at removing my ego from the equation, it thinks it knows what’s coming and what has happened, too often it’s full of itself! Ego is a hard demon to harness, we all have it, we get tied up in what we’ve learned through trial and error and seem to convince ourselves that it’s the only correct way to do, or approach anything. So, the next step is leveling up to speak with our future selves and that’s where the inner work of the hierarchy comes in, this is the face your demons, do your shadow work daily, check yourself before you wreck yourself part of the work and that begins with your self-talk.
What is your self-talk? Because if your self-talk begins with I can’t, or I’m not worth it, or I’m worthless, you need to realize what a freaking miracle you are in the lottery of life. Do you know how rare it is for you to be here as a human in this exact moment in time? The odds of winning the lottery are much higher than the odds of you being born. Spirit is here to experience life through the vehicle of the body you are providing, and it took a lot of energy to get you here on this planet for them to have that experience, so you ARE special, you do have a PURPOSE so stop speaking to yourself as if you’re not worthy. There’s a spirit inside of you, look it in the eye, in the mirror daily and say I Love You, thank you for choosing me and watch your life begin to shift.
This is the reason I can see the pain and the truths behind the seemingly crazy, I understand all too well the hurt of self-realization just before self-actualization. Empathy is key, but even something as sweet and innocuous sounding as empathy, can be taken too far in either direction creating an illness of expectation. Lack of, or too much of, anything is a roadblock, love of self means - respect of self, boundaries must be set to protect the work that you’ve completed. Knowing when to be hard and when to be soft takes practice and we all break people and things we didn’t mean to, sometimes unwittingly. My special talent seems to be, being able to see the truths that lie within the madness, in those moments of extremity in between. Perceptions are faulty, they’re based on our biases, the only thing that gives us true insight is changing perspective and sometimes that dance requires a few steps in every direction. Try to see beyond you, let go of your preconceived notions, desires and biases foisted on you by religion and tribe/community and endeavor to see the truth behind the actions, it will make you uncomfortable, you may get squeamish, it may cost you the loss of people whom you thought were friends, but you will broaden your perceptions as well as your horizons (cliché I know) but truth is always found in the shadows.
Love you,
Tay