| Remember
that the goal of this teaching is to facilitate the lessons of
unconditional love and acceptance. There is no possibility of
accomplishing this toward others if you have not first learned
how to unconditionally accept yourself.
Here
are seven steps to lead you in that direction.
1.
Trust in your perceptivity.
2.
Ruthless truthfulness with yourself.
3.
Acknowledging that the world and those in it are perfect and
making a commitment to be tolerant.
4.
Allow yourself your own power and constant choice to be appropriate
with it.
5.
Erasing fear and the chief negative feature to live in gentleness
and joy.
6.
Truly experiencing surrender and therefore power and control,
which leads to the true integration of personality and essence.
This allows you to fully experience the physical plane as well
as the truth, love, and beauty of the other planes.
7.
Humility
1.
Trust in your perceptivity.
The
first step to self-agape has to do with developing your ability
to perceive. Perceiving is not thinking about, nor is it figuring
out or scrutinizing. Remember that perceptivity is a function
of your emotional center and that perception is a feeling. This
is the ability to size up the truth of a situation, experience,
or person by instantly and emotionally sensing what is so about
them. You might walk into a business meeting where a number of
people are present and you can instantly perceive whom you can
trust and whom you should be careful about. You can instantly
perceive as well whether you are going to get anywhere with this
team or whether you are going to waste time and money with them.
The aphorism "Don't guess, perceive", applies to this
step.
This
is an important way to look at perceptivity. Your society does
not encourage people to follow and trust their own intuitions
and perceptions. Characteristically older souls, because of their
experience, have inherently good perceptivity skills. The problem
tends to be that older souls lose confidence in their perceptivity
when they live in a young soul society that places a low value
on intuition and perception. Thus, this first step to self-agape
is to trust and develop the skill of perception.
2.
Ruthless truthfulness with yourself.
The
second step to self-agape encourages you to be completely honest
with yourself. Ruthless truthfulness means the courage to state
what is so about yourself and your perceptions at any one time.
This truthfulness does not have so much to do with perceiving
as it does with telling the truth about what you perceived. Often
you perceive accurately but then deny what you saw, or distort
is so much that the truth becomes unrecognizable. You may accurately
assess that the business team gathered is a bad mix of personalities
and that your endeavors will come to grief. However, if you should
slide to the negative poles of your overleaves and become, for
example, ingratiating, you may deny to yourself and the others
your original perception. You will act as if everything is fine
and proceed foolishly into a mess.
Knowing
and telling the truth, however, can be tricky. Because the truth
is unique for each individual, one person's truth is another
person's lie. In addition, truth is not always constant but changes
as the soul matures and gains experience. The truth for a baby
soul is different from the truth for a mature soul. The truth
for a baby soul is that law, order, and obedience to authority
are the most necessary ingredients to live a good life. The truth
for a mature soul is that individual search and questioning of
authority is necessary for a good life. Ruthless truthfulness
is a form of compassion and need not be seen as a way of putting
oneself down or being self-deprecating. Being self-truthful is
not beating yourself up but seeing in a detached way what the
reality is and what must be done.
3.
Acknowledging that the world and the people in it are perfect
and making a commitment to be tolerant.
The
third step focuses on acknowledging that people are perfect the
way they are. Perfect means that each person is following his
or her own path just the way that they should. In other words,
every person is learning their lessons in his or her chosen ways.
The important lesson one person is learning may be the important
lesson that another person learned ten lifetimes ago or will
learn three lifetimes from now. Therefore perfection does not
have to be a high ideal or look like your pictures of what the
world is supposed to be, but in fact what is. The concept of
perfection in "what is" has always been one of the most difficult
for students to understand. You may ask, how can the world be
perfect if there is killing, war, famine, and disease? How can
so-and-so be perfect if he lies, cheats, and steals from me?
Should I do nothing, then, to correct or stop these things?
The
answer is paradoxical. Yes, all these things are being perfectly
done and everyone is learning their lessons exactly the way they
had hoped (on an essence level, of course). However, part of
this perfection is that when you perceive injustice you perfectly
move to correct it. Therefore physical reality is a game that
everyone gets to play, the unjust and the just, and in the illusion
of time one will eventually become the other, and the game continues.
4.
Allow yourself your own power and the constant choice to be
appropriate with it.
Personal
power is the result of telling the truth. Telling the truth gives
you presence, and presence is perceived as power. Being appropriate
with power is a unique task for each individual. The more powerful
a person is, the simpler the message. The philosophical writings
of young souls are often lengthy, complex, and difficult to read.
The message of old souls tends to be far simpler. The teachings
and concepts of Jesus Christ are immensely powerful and are phrased
in the simplest possible terms, as in the parables and in statements
such as "Love your neighbor as yourself." The Buddha taught the
eightfold path based on the simple truth that to crave is to
suffer. Meher Baba said, "Don't worry, be happy." What could
be simpler?
5.
Erase fear and your chief negative feature to live in gentleness
and joy.
Attention
and awareness are the chief tools for erasing fear. Fear is a
by-product of the false personality and when you shift your identification
away from the false personality and toward essence you automatically
begin to dissolve fear. All seven chief features -- self-destruction,
greed, self-deprecation, arrogance, martyrdom, impatience, and
stubbornness are based on fears. A major life task each lifetime
is to erase the neutralizing effect of the chief feature so that
you can reach your goal. When you are realizing your life goal,
whether it is acceptance or growth, you feel the joy of essence
work. The experience of joy always leads to gentleness.
6.
Truly experiencing surrender and therefore power and control.
This
allows you to fully experience the physical plane as well as
the truth, love, and beauty of the other planes. As you can see,
step six contains a paradox, calling on you to experience surrender
while at the same time experiencing personal power. You need
to be able to hold this contradiction at one and the same time
in order to be in control. In one sense, surrender means no longer
resisting the events and experiences of the physical plane. Surrender
does not mean giving up, but embracing essence-directed lessons
and opportunities. When you stop resisting being in a body and
the karma that accompanies it, you begin to rapidly accelerate
your spiritual growth. As you accelerate you become more powerful
because you learn to fear nothing. Spiritual growth allows you
to access the higher centers -- higher intellectual, higher emotional,
and higher moving. As you begin to open up to the higher centers
you begin to experience the truth, love, and beauty of all the
planes within the Tao.
7.
Humility
This
seventh step is the experience of completion after you have mastered
the first six steps. The seventh step allows you to let go of
attachment to that achievement and this neutrality is expressed
as humility.
| Authors
Details:
José Stevens
José Stevens,
Ph.D., is the founder of Essence Psychology and lectures
internationally on essence and personality, shamanism,
and prosperity. He is the author of Tao To
Earth and Transforming
Your Dragons and Secrets of Shamanism.
The
Authors Web Site
|
|
