Many of us know we need to change, but how do we do it?

Spiritual teacher and intuitive counselor Beth Maynard Green offers a thorough, compassionate, and practical guide to personal and collective transformation. This step-by-step handbook gives solutions for overcoming ego domination, becoming happier and more relaxed, and achieving higher consciousness. It blends new and old wisdom in ways that are fresh yet familiar.

In Section 1 of Living with Reality, Maynard Green shares original insights into who we are and includes the genesis of the ego, the development of our personalities from birth, the roles of fear and pain, and the causes of addiction. Section 2 provides a program for change and discusses

- challenging yet commonsense paradigms
- clear explanations of our habitual behavior patterns and ways to break them
- practices that make us more relaxed, happy, and supportive to our world
- self-help exercises, including detailed questions for self-reflection
- techniques to access higher consciousness
Practical and powerful, Living with Reality is a manual for living and a vehicle for both group and individual study and transformation. Read it! Live it!

Living with Reality

Who We Are, What We Could Be, How We Get ThereBy Beth Maynard Green

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Beth Maynard Green
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-5654-4

Contents

Preface: Who We Are & What We Could Be...........................................................................xviiAcknowledgements.................................................................................................xxiIntroduction: Ego, Instinct & Evolution: Are We Ready to Change?.................................................1Living with Reality..............................................................................................37Section I—The Human Condition Who We Are...................................................................39Chapter 1. What Is Reality, And Why Is It So Hard to Live With?..................................................41Chapter 2. The Human Condition: The Pain & Fear that Drive Us....................................................59Chapter 3. The Fear and Pain of Disconnection....................................................................65Chapter 4. Changing Our State Addictions & Fantasy...............................................................86Chapter 5. Who We Are & What We Could Be.........................................................................96Chapter 6. How to Get There – Learning to Live with Reality: An Outline of Our Program.....................98Section II—The Platforms – What We Could Be & How to Get There.......................................103A Few Reminders Before We Start..................................................................................105Part 1. Partnering with Others: The First Four Platforms.........................................................107Platform One: Becoming Oneness – The Essence of Who We Are.................................................109Platform Two: Becoming Differentiated – Individuation in the Context of Oneness............................164Platform Three: Becoming Co-Creative – How We Relate to the Universe.......................................205Platform Four: Becoming Mutually Supportive – Living Oneness...............................................245Part 2. Partnering with Ourselves – The Second Three Platforms.............................................299A Few Comments to Introduce Our Next Section.....................................................................301Platform Five: Becoming Self-Aware – The First Step toward Self-Mastery....................................303Platform Six: Becoming Integrated – Gaining More Command Over Ourselves....................................391Platform Seven: Becoming Accountable – Awareness, Amends and Transformation................................429Part 3. Partnering with the Process of Living: The Final Two Platforms...........................................513A Few Comments to Introduce Our Next Section.....................................................................515Platform Eight: Becoming Not-Knowing – Becoming Available to Higher Consciousness..........................517Platform Nine: Becoming Becoming – Relaxing into the Process of Living.....................................568Epilogue: Where We Have Come.....................................................................................619Appendix A: List of Tools........................................................................................623Appendix B: Letter from The Stream August 2011...................................................................635About Beth Maynard Green.........................................................................................643

Chapter One

What Is Reality, And Why Is It So Hard to Live With?

Reality is what is—what we see and what we don't see. It is objective. It is not an illusion. There is a spectrum of colors, whether we can see them or not. The tree falls in the forest, whether we hear it or not. The climate is changing, whether we acknowledge it or not. And people are driven by inner drives and demons, whether they are aware of them or not.

In addition, there is another realm of reality that most people cannot see or even sense or measure. While many refer to that reality as the spiritual realm, it is no more or less spiritual than the color blue. This reality is the spectrum of vibrational energies that have not yet been measured, but which impact matter and can alter our emotional state. For those of us who have worked with these realms, they are as real as peanut butter.

All this seems relatively simple and straightforward. Reality exists. Let's expand our understanding of it. Let's live with it. If this is so straightforward, why do I need to devote an entire book to the topic? Because we don't see or don't want to deal with reality, and there are several reasons why.

1. Our perceptions are limited, individually and collectively, to what we can see.

2. We each live in our own subjective world.

3. Our egos have designed behaviors to cope with our subjective experience.

4. Reality gets in the way of our wants, desires and plans.

Let's look at these one at a time.

OUR PERCEPTIONS ARE LIMITED, INDIVIDUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY, TO WHAT WE CAN SEE

Our perceptions are limited by at least four factors:

• Our built-in physical capacities

• The limitations of the instruments we have designed to go beyond our own capacities

• Our willingness to see

• The partialness of our perspective

Our Built-In Physical Capacities

Let's look at light waves, as an example. With the naked eye, we can see only a certain spectrum of color because of the limitations of our physical capacities. But today we are well aware that there are infrared and ultraviolet rays that we can't perceive with our eyes, but which have an effect on us. When we look at a person, we can't see his or her genes, but much of that person's life has been influenced, if not pre-determined, by his or her genetic makeup, something we can't see with our unassisted eyes.

While our senses cannot see everything, we can often detect the effect of things that we cannot directly perceive. For example, long before we started understanding heredity, people would comment that, "The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree." We noticed similarities within families, though we couldn't distinguish between characteristics that were inherited and those that were caused by environmental influences. To a large degree, we still can't. We saw the effect of gravity long before we could measure it. And, speaking of apples, we knew the apple would fall from the tree long before we knew why.

We have become used to the idea that there's much in the material world that we cannot see and that we need instruments or theories to begin to grapple with them. We are also beginning to realize that people, too, have motivations of which we may not be aware. You meet Mary. She's wearing a blue dress. Why? You think she's wearing the dress because she likes it, if you think about it at all. You have no idea of her unseen motivations. For example, maybe Mary feels insecure and misses her mom. Her mother loved blue, and wearing the dress reminds Mary of her. Or maybe Mary thinks George will like the dress and be attracted to her. Or maybe she doesn't feel feminine and hopes that a dress will change the way she feels about herself. Or maybe Mary really wanted to wear jeans that day, but all her comfortable clothes were sitting in the laundry basket, because she was up half the night eating popcorn and watching Clint Eastwood movies. Or maybe Mary hates blue, but she's broke and the dress was on sale.

People are tremendously complex. Few of us have a clue as to what goes on behind the façade of appearances, and yet these motivations fuel our behavior and the behavior of everyone around us. This is as true on a collective level as it is on an individual level. We may go to war because we're collectively feeling impotent about some circumstances in our lives, not because war is actually called for.

Few people will now deny the existence of the psychological and sociological realms, whether or not we truly understand them. But many still deny the existence of the spiritual realms. Sometimes we can see the effect of a reality even though we can't see the cause. As I mentioned before, we can see the effect of the earth's gravitational field, even though we can't see the field itself with our naked senses. We see the infection, though we can't see the germs. And we experience the impact of all kinds of unseen vibrational energies, whether or not we even acknowledge their existence. It would be wise to learn more about them.

The Limitations of the Instruments & Methodologies We Have Designed to Go Beyond Our Own Capacities

Today our ability to understand is greatly expanded by new instruments. There was a time when we couldn't even imagine a sub-atomic level of existence, much less the vast expanses of the universe. Over the past centuries, however, we have come to realize that there are realms of existence that we cannot perceive without tools, and so we have aggressively sought more sophisticated instruments and understanding. But our tools and instruments are still limited. The instruments themselves may lack the power or sensitivity to reveal what is there, and/or we may lack the knowledge or sophistication to correctly interpret what information they bring.

The same is true of human psychology and social behavior. We are beginning to comprehend what motivates us, but we are still blinded by self-interest, as well as limitations in our thinking and in our perceptive capacities. Most of us cannot see deeply enough into the psyche to recognize the subtle and historic causes of our behavior, and if we have no experience withthislevelofinquiry,wewon'tevenasktherightquestionsortrytodesign the means to answer them. (See Platform Five: Becoming Self-Aware.) In addition, we are still misunderstanding the mind-body-spirit connection, and few of us even take into consideration the collective consciousness within our families and communities, going back generations, much less the impact of energies that are unseen and unperceivable.

As an intuitive, I am well aware of our collective blindness to that which motivates our reactivity and responses. And as an intuitive, I am a more sensitive instrument for perception than most other people. But even though I am able to see more than most, I am still well aware of my own limitations. How much more limited are those who don't acknowledge the existence of these realms of reality and who don't work toward understanding them?

Since people are often frightened or reluctant to acknowledge the unknown, we often deny the existence of that which we don't or can't see. But rather than limit ourselves, let us open our minds to all realms. Let us acknowledge that we are still limited by our perceptions and instruments of perception, and let us become more sensitive ourselves while developing more sensitive instruments as well. We would gain more understanding if we explored the unknown, rather than insisting that if we can't see something, it must not exist.

Our Willingness to See

We've admitted our limitations and designed instruments and modalities to compensate for our limited capacities, and we will continue to do so. But even with better tools, our vision can still be limited by what we want to see. Even scientists can hit blind spots when ego gets involved and the scientist doesn't want to acknowledge something that threatens her status. Blind spots are common when it comes to understanding history and human behavior, too. For example, we may not want to recognize in ourselves behaviors that cause us to feel shame, such as a sexual obsession with children or other actions or thoughts that we consider reprehensible or perverted. We also tend to ignore reality when it frightens us or would cause upheaval in our lives, such as was the case when German Jews denied the implications of the growth of Nazism in Germany before World War II.

Our willingness to see reality is also a function of our attachment to patterns of behavior, the familiarity of which gives us a false sense of safety and security. We may not want to see that they are not working or are even destructive. We could be blind to a personal pattern, such as the inability to be open and honest in an intimate relationship; we could be similarly unwilling to see a collective pattern, such as a failed foreign policy in which we continue to invest.

What are we willing to question? What are we willing to see?

And what are we willing to see about the reality beyond our current vision of what is? In much of Western society, we are not very open to examining the mostly unchartered spiritual domains. This closed-mindedness may be because we already have a spiritual belief system to which we are attached or because we refuse to consider having any at all. Let's quickly look at both behaviors.

Some of us already have pat answers about spirituality, and having pat answers give us a sense of safety in the world. This is my religion or belief, and my beliefs explain the way things are, how to cope, and how to be. I don't want to consider anything different, even if my current beliefs seem to be creating needless fear, pain, or shame, and even if they have effects opposite to that which was originally intended. Are we willing to question our beliefs in the light of what we see? Are we willing to see anything that conflicts with what we believe? (I discuss all this further in Platforms Eight and Nine: Becoming Not-Knowing and Becoming Becoming.)

Some of us reject the unseen realms altogether. Sometimes this rigid view has been caused by our reaction to having had earlier disappointments with spiritual belief systems. If a system seemed not to have worked for us, we might have tossed out the whole realm. Rather than question the specific beliefs, we may have denied the reality of higher consciousness itself. The ego contributes to this reaction. Let's say I prayed. I asked God to save my mom or get me a pony, but God did not give me what I wanted. I am now angry because my prayers failed to harness the universal forces for my goals. My conclusion: There is no higher intelligence in the universe.

Sometimes we reject the possibility of the existence of realms beyond ordinary consciousness because we know we cannot control them, and that reality makes us feel uncomfortable. The ego is at work here again. The unseen energies feel vast and are not in our ego's control, so maybe we can just pretend they don't exist.

The Partialness of Our Perspective

We have been discussing the difficulty of knowing reality, because of our limited perceptions. Before leaving this topic, let's acknowledge something else that we also know: that we can each see only a piece of a puzzle, and we often refuse to be cognizant of that. There's an old story about three blind men touching an elephant. One touches her trunk, another her side, and another her tail. Each one describes what he perceives. If each is stuck in the belief that his perception is the truth, each will have a very distorted picture of an elephant. If the three trust one another and share information, they will be able to transcend their own limitations.

Our egos tend to get very attached to our perspective. If I am a welfare recipient, a welfare worker or a taxpayer, I am likely to have a different perspective on welfare. Only when we all come together and share information do we begin to be able to describe reality.

Here are some questions to help you expand your perspective of reality.

1. Do I believe in only that which I have personally seen or experienced?

2. Have I had an experience where I believed in only my own perceptions, only to discover that I was wrong?

3. In what areas of life am I closed to questioning?

4. Do I believe there are realms beyond my perception?

5. Do I have fixed beliefs about them?

6. Why?

7. Have I been in a situation where I felt attached to my own perspective?

8. Did I ever come to realize that my perspective was narrow?

WE EACH EXIST IN OUR OWN SUBJECTIVE WORLD

We have now discussed how our perceptions are limited and how limited perceptions influence our ability to be in and, therefore, live with reality. Now we're going to discuss an even more fundamental limitation. Human beings don't live in reality at all. We live in our heads, in our emotions, in what we experience. We were built that way. We are sentient beings. We feel.

Let me say that again. We do not live in reality. We live in our reactions and feelings on the physical, emotional, and psychic levels. Because we are sentient and sensitive, we can easily become uncomfortable. When we are uncomfortable, we suffer. And when we suffer, we tend to focus on trying to alter our feeling state, so that we can stop suffering. The result of this simple reality is that human beings focus on fixing our reactions and feelings instead of addressing reality itself.

Let's say you fall off the roof. What are you experiencing? Your immediate experience is the physical sensation of falling and the emotional fear that you will hurt yourself. Yikes! What's going to happen? Your next experience is the hideous physical pain of having hurt yourself and all the emotional worries that come along with the fall, worries such as: How badly hurt am I? Who will come rescue me? Will I be able to work after the fall? Will I be permanently disabled? Can I afford the hospital bills? The third experience typically is some psychological interpretation of the event and who is at fault. I feel embarrassed for having fallen. I feel stupid for having been on the roof when I wasn't competent to be there. I feel angry with the person who asked me to work on the roof. I feel annoyed with myself that my pride caused me to climb on the roof when I knew better. I feel ashamed that I couldn't afford to hire someone else to fix the roof. And so on.

Our bodies are busily trying to cope with the reality of what has occurred, but our brains are experiencing pain on both the physical and emotional levels. Why?

Because we are sentient beings. We are designed that way. We feel. We experience the physical world through our five senses, and we experience life through our feelings. Many of us are locked into the delusion that we are rational and realistic, and that rationality is what motivates us. But this is not the case. We are always moved by some motivation that has to do with changing or maintaining a feeling state. If I feel good, I want to continue feeling good. If I feel bad, I want to escape or change the bad feeling, unless feeling bad somehow makes me feel good. Even rational behavior is motivated by a desire to feel something positive. I may want to look rational because looking rational makes me appear different or better than somebody else, while looking irrational might humiliate me or make me feel vulnerable to others. For example, looking rational might give me and/or others the impression that I am in control of the universe, even though I'm not, and appearing to be in control makes me feel good.

Even when we are actually being objective, we are being motivated by feelings. I know that a certain behavior will cause me pain, so I stop myself from pursuing that behavior. I look like I'm being motivated by rationality, but I'm still really trying to avoid pain. I'm still experiencing life through a feeling state.

If we're busy experiencing life through our feelings, everything is complicated. Let's go back to our example of falling off the leaking roof. Let's say that I believe that if the house had been better built or maintained, the roof wouldn't have leaked. Now watch all the feelings that might plague me. Why am I living in a poorly built house? Did I make a foolish choice? Am I too poor to rent or buy a better place? Why am I too poor? Am I a failure at earning a living? Isn't it my boss's fault for not giving me the raise that would have gotten me a better house? The house inspector should have noticed this weakness in the roof, and I should have known that the inspector was doing a lousy job checking out the house. Who recommended that inspector anyway? The roof is leaking, but what I'm feeling is shame and anger.

If I have a life partner, the leaking roof might bring up other negative feelings. I'm angry with my partner because he or she has not been aggressive enough in earning more money, or because he or she didn't notice the problem with the roof before, or can't fix it. My anger at my partner can be a camouflage of more shame about myself. Why am I stuck with a loser as a partner? Is it because I'm not smart or sexy or something enough to have attracted someone who would make enough money so that we could live in a better house, where the roof wouldn't leak? Or if I'm single, I could think: God damn it! Why do I have to do everything? Why don't I have a partner? What's wrong with me?

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Living with Realityby Beth Maynard Green Copyright © 2011 by Beth Maynard Green. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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