In the Beginning is an excerpt from To Do Your Work which goes into the energetic background of the twelve pressure points of modern life.
In the beginning.
This is where the fundamental challenge of life arises.
Because, from a logical, mind-oriented perspective, the primordial genesis of life is indescribable, unproveable.
The beginning is unknown.
The beginning is the unknown.
Overtime, the beginning has acquired labels to attempt description and understanding. These words, such as chaos and abyss, paint the unknown as fearful darkness and danger.
The beginning also makes clear that, for the linear condition of the human mind, there is that which is known, unknown, and unknowable.
However, in the heart – and in the mind which willingly ventures into the unknown – there is awareness of a transcendent presence and an ancient energy still connected and part of modern times.
In this awareness, the heart stands in awe of that which is unknown. The unknown seems at once to be both loving and embracing. While there is also an inherent sense of fear which develops from what is known, this transcendence is ultimately undefinable within its aspect as unknown and unknowable.
Religious traditions around the world have met the challenges of this great unknown with creation stories to explain the beginning. Wars have been, and continue to be, waged for one story to maintain ascendancy over all other stories.
Fear of the unknown is real and pervasive now and through all known human history despite the efforts of religious belief.
Managing this fear of the unknown is the history of humankind. For if personal sense of awe propagates a reactionary fear to both isolate and dominate, what is important is safety and control.
In contrast, if your sense of awe creates within wonder and a desire for connection with all, then your motivation in life will be to learn and connect without limitation or boundary.
Because of the great unknown, human history is a story of power dynamics based on a warring debate on the proper response to the unknown. One push is to protect safety at all costs by judging and limiting connection. In contrast is the choice to trust connection to bridge all gaps and create stability between diverse groups.
This is also a history fought between the mind and the heart. A battle between those in fear of the unknown and wanting to control to guarantee safety versus those who are not held back by fear and seek equity in connection. The desire to know and prove beyond all doubt is the push of the mind. While the heart knows that certainty does not need to exist for there to be trust, connection, and understanding.
Over the last 2500 years, human history has been dominated by the urges of the mind to be certain and safe. The power structure which has created kingdoms, countries, and governments has fought wars and enslaved people based on their perception that dominant power protects and keeps ours safe from the dangers of the unknown.
In fear, this Power-Over structure seeks to create an environment in which safety is assured and control is absolute. Power-Over does not want to share or connect as equals because it wants its voice to be that of supreme, unquestioned authority.
Above all else, Power-Over wants by any means necessary to be able to suppress all opposition to its imposition of authority and dominance. Using logical argument and reactionary propaganda, Power-Over asserts its version of truth and reality to create and maintain dominant authority and to devise and propagate a story of who wins approval as a worthy and acceptable member of the protected group.
In the face of this assertion of power and perceived truth, the heart of wonder and connection struggles to feel effective and worthy. The energy and perspective of the heart threatens the mind in its Power-Over structure.
The heart is motivated by the unseen, the unknown, and the transcendent. The heart needs no intellectual proof to discern what is balanced and aligned. The heart’s inherent nature is to know when and what to trust. Though this puts the heart right in the middle of the unknown, the trust of connection creates a powerful guide for the heart within the unknown at any moment.
This willingness to step out of safety, beyond control, is exactly what the mind fears and what authoritarian power is determined to avoid at all costs.
To establish control over the heart, the mind judges, criticizes, and condemns. The mind, through Power-Over’s agenda, creates competition to determine who and what is good and who or what is bad.
In fear that the competition cannot be won by the good as determined by this dominant agenda, Power-Over pushes forward its most important fallacy:
As inherently unworthy, personal worth must be proven.
This need to prove personal worth becomes the basis of the Power-Over competition. Divorced from its inner sense of power and value, the heart cannot win this game. Fight is not the way of the heart nor is the heart motivated to gain control. The heart does not thrive in an environment where the means are justified by the end goal of authoritarian control and the desire, motivated by a primal fear of the unknown, to win, no matter the cost, the sacrifice, or the loss of integrity.
To divert any sense of personal autonomy, Power-Over focuses this directive to prove personal worth in two primary motions. First, this agenda condemns the belief in any sense of inner self belief as wrong. Denigrated and destroyed, self-truth can only come from outside of self, from the dominant authority. Next, and taken a step further, self-worth can only be proven in service to others. In other words, this emphasis on subservience diverts the focus and purpose of life to outside validation of personal truth and value thereby destroying a clear sense of personal worth.
To win the game, Power-Over uses the inherent connection between people to propagate and distribute its agenda through words, phrases, and ideas which maintain its control and ensure its dominance. Through the perversion of Mass Consciousness, the natural connection between all, the propaganda is delivered and is used by many versions of Power-Over to dominate and control.
Power-Over also exerts control in six primary forms to maintain its ascendancy and the dominion of its values and perceived truths.
To further control, people are manipulated by fear – particularly fear of loss of safety and protection from the enemy and the unknown.
Standards are created to judge who is worthy and who is acceptable. Standards are applied differently to those who are defined as good and are generally harsher on those who are unwilling to concede and are thus unacceptable to the Power-Over structure.
To assert control and maintain power, the Power-Over agenda makes one primary promise: the Future is All. All efforts and promises to maintain power are directed toward a future when all will be exactly as promised. The undesirables will be eliminated, and the accepted, chosen few will be free to live life outside of fear as proven worthy human beings who have correctly supported Power-Over.
Those who step out of line, who question the values of authority, who dare live and believe in a way which differs from the Power-Over agenda – these are the people to blame for failure, for hurt and harm, for the appearance of that which is feared and unknown. Blame makes clear who to include, who to avoid, who to eliminate.
Power-Over also attempts control through the fallacy of scarcity. Simply put, Power-Over maintains that there is not enough to go around, and the only way to make sure you and yours don’t miss out is to agree and behave within the power agenda. Only the accepted have any hope of receiving safety and protection during times of scarcity.
If all else fails to suppress undesirable thoughts and behaviors, then Power-Over seeks to oppress with coercion as a threat of violence to the very life of those who will not comply as directed. This coercive action thrives in the sewers of hate.
The efforts of control, fear, blame, standards, promises of the future, myth of scarcity, and coercion are all orchestrated to win the game at all costs, and do so by destroying any sense of self-worth and personal agency. If the dictates of Power-Over are not accepted, then the outcome is to be demeaned, ostracized, and equated with the dangerous and contemptible unknown.
This is a grim, overwhelming existence.
Except for this: the resiliency of the human heart.
The heart wants to do its work. The heart wants to connect. The heart does not need fear to control and limit. The heart wants to begin within and trust its choice and its desire for full, empowered life.
The heart steps forward personally as Power-Within and expresses in society as Power-With.
The premise of this book is that Power-Within can successfully counter Power-Over because the current energetic shifts within humankind now support the emergence of the heart as primary guide.
This is not to say that the mind is no longer capable or needed. Instead within the current global shift, life is about the integration of heart and mind, the integration of the spiritual and the physical into a unified, balanced whole no longer dominated by the fear and influence of the Power-Over preference for separation and disconnection.
This shifting motion creates pressure within as the push of Power-Over grates on the emergence of Power-Within. This emergence of Power-Within is the biggest threat to the authority of Power-Over. For Power-Over the current stakes are challenged and the fear of loss drives toward costlier, deadlier means.
For Power-Within, there are twelve points of pressure to reconcile and reverse to find a new expression of intrinsic self-worth no longer subservient to outside authority.
These twelve pressure points are created by the Power-Over agenda and have been part of human experience to a degree that most feel like the ideas contained in the pressure points are insurmountable truths which must not, cannot, be questioned.
This book supports illumination, questioning, and a path for resolution of these pressures – a path to do your work.
The twelve pressure points are:
Delusion of Power-Over: The only acceptable structure of power dynamics.
Blind Production: The fallacy that you must prove your worth to be an acceptable, good human being.
Self-Belief Misplacement: the only valid source of truth is outside authority; thus, self-belief and self-trust are inaccurate and failed.
Mass Consciousness: misused universal connection to disseminate the fallacies of Power-Over.
Manipulation through Fear: the initial attempt to control and dominate through Power-Over by utilizing fear to influence behavior and choice.
Service Misplacement: proof of personal worth can only be made by being subservient to others.
Illusion of Standards: a list of false judgments of who is good and who is bad.
Illusion of Future is All: the means today are judged by how safety in the future is guaranteed.
Calculation of Reactive Blame: creates scapegoats, outsiders, and strangers responsible for all failure and threat to a safe future.
Myth of Scarcity: the belief that there is only enough for the chosen few, creating a primal concern of missing out and the threat of death.
Oppression of Coercion and Hate: the threat of violence and the exercise of hate as the ultimate forms of control.
The resolution of these twelve pressure points does not guarantee utopia or a life without challenge or heartache.
Instead, working through these points is first about shifting your perspective, then changing your playing field and taking yourself out of the direct influence of the Power-Over game.
In fact, To Do Your Work shifts life from a high stakes power game to an experience of connection and trust.
To Do Your Work is the efforts of the heart to lead life, dealing with whatever challenges may arise. Not as proof of the Power-Over agenda, rather that the heart can lead life despite or without fear of the unknown. Empowered, life within spiritual-physical integration willingly, moment to moment, moves into the unknown with joyful anticipation and trust that whatever arises can be met and experienced beyond expectation, blame, fear, judgment – or violence.
When you do the work of your heart, life goes from fear-driven blind reaction to thoughtful response through heart-centered vulnerable openness.
Heart and mind integrated, now there is time to learn, laugh, and love.
In the resolution of these pressure points comes the confidence and trust to live life within the unknown.
No longer unconquerable abyss, the unknown becomes opportunity and a path into a life beyond imagination and full of the heart’s transcendent, awe-filled awareness.
In the Beginning is an excerpt from my book, To Do Your Work. To read other excerpts from this work-in-progress, start here.
To learn more about the concepts within To Do Your Work, begin with this article: The Spiritual Practice of Personal Power.