twins

Assertiveness?

This is a very common issue out there in society. In fact it's one of the most frequently encountered and common social issues that you will ever experience, and understand that the vast majority of issues you will have to deal with in life all come from other people. Not your health. Not even money. In fact your health issues and financial issues pale in comparison with the issues and crap you have to deal with from other people.

Consider that many of your financial issues start out with a decision someone else has taken. Poverty is a conscious choice people make every day towards their fellow human beings, and quite often much of that is caused by people who are assertive in their beliefs and decisive in their decisions, which also coincidentally seem to jive with some sort of ideology or belief system.

But it's also important to remember that the roots of this behaviour lie in the way that we are socially and mentally conditioned and the social and cultural values we are taught from fairly early in childhood. School teaches us to be competitive rather than cooperative or collaborative and the messaging starts early on that you need to be in control, take charge, always be sure, trust yourself, and do the right thing. Understand that you're going through life chained to an Ego, without which in our society you will very quickly become toast. You don't get given the choice over whether you develop an Ego or not. But it is also true that if you do develop an Ego you're going to be deceived, cheated, you're going to act out of stupidity and you're also going to get hurt.

But the thing is, and my main point here is, that all this social conditioning and Ego development, competitiveness, assertiveness and being decisive all the time has very little to do with the actual reality of your life experience. Furthermore even if you don't see yourself as an idiot or a Karen (to use a modern term) other people will see you this way. You might want to think about how many ways modern social and cultural values actually work against you and why your Ego can end up doing you in.

You do not know how to make choices or decisions

This is the reality of your life. Trust me on this. You do not know what a big decision is. You do not know what a little or minor decision is. Some of your big decisions in life won't work out no matter how hard you try. But some of the smaller, seemingly insignificant choices you make can turn out to have enormous consequences which you had no way of knowing and could not have taken into consideration.

Many people experience a great deal of anxiety and even fear whenever they're put into a situation where they have to make a choice or decision. We are all very much aware of the connection between choices and consequences. This is something you learn early in childhood. Assertiveness and assertiveness training usually glosses over your inability to make choices and decisions and it does so by convincing you that you always need to be in control.

But see you might have noticed, but your environment is a lot bigger and far more powerful than you are. Understand that the universe is coming at you constantly in a vast multi-dimensional continuum of different sensations and experiences. By comparison, the focus of your conscious attention is extremely limited and narrow. You can only focus on one, two, maybe three variables at the same time without needing to take notes or write stuff down. Can you juggle three balls in the air and keep them moving for long periods of time? I rest my case.

This is where all assertiveness training does you a tremendous disservice. You see you cannot be in control of any situation without putting yourself into a situation where you have to defend yourself and struggle. This is because you are really not in control of your life, your environment is. Your life always involves a relationship with some sort of environment, be it your home environment, a social environment, the natural environment, the womb of your mother before you were born. Your life is all about you and your relationship to your environment. If you try to take control of your environment you disrupt the relationship between consciousness and energy and come into conflict with your environment.

A bit of hesitation and confusion goes a long way

Here we need to understand the difference between life and memory and to be very clear about the differences.

Life is your experience of your environment. Some people call it real life, or even The School of Hard Knocks. I call it simply relationship. Taking out the regular, the habitual and the mundane (the stuff you do over and over again) your life is a process of unconnected events, mysteries, random happenings, things which don't connect to one another, conflicts, misunderstandings, mistakes, getting the wrong end of the stick, being caught out, and some stuff you don't understand or haven't worked out yet. In reality this is the exact same process of creativity and interaction which is going on in the universe and on this planet. No difference whatsoever.

Understand that you live on the basis of memory. You can only be as consciously aware as you can recall from memory and you can translate from consciousness into language and action. This is where we get into the difference between consciousness and energy because while you are conscious and aware that consciousness exists, your life experience is 99% physical and based on energy waves and cycles:

  • Consciousness is the basis of all existence. Consciousness is infinite, random, spontaneous and cannot be explained, defined, understood or fully known.
  • Energy is the basis of physical existence. It is finite, constant, and is a matter of cycle or waves, wavelengths, frequency, and how it relates to consciousness.

You live your life in various cycles, rituals, habits, often doing the same things over and over again repeatedly. You might go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, you get dressed and shower the same way, and do things repeatedly over and over again. All this physical action is known as karma, because karma is a Sanskrit word which means action or activity. When you put everything together the way you live your life can be understood to be a karmic process.

Why you struggle to make choices and decisions in life

You struggle to make choices and decisions in life because you're always trying to predict possibilities. There are only two states of being - reality and possibility. Reality is what you are experiencing right now. Both the past and the future are only possibilities. Consider that you can only think of the past or the future as a thought in the present moment, or the here and now.

Ultimately, the only real choice you have in any given situation is whether you make your choices and decisions more consciously, or less consciously. This is the only real choice you have. But please understand that even if you do have this one choice, it can be a very powerful choice. You see that one choice leads to four things you can change:

  1. Personal integrity and whether or not you express your truth or you pretend to be something different, or lie.
  2. The choice over whether to gain insight or share insight with others. Or not.
  3. The choice over how you express yourself and how you use language.
  4. The choice of environment where you want to experience your life.

However it's also got to be said that you cannot go overboard with anxiety, confusion, hesitation because that will lead you thinking about life far more than actually living your life and experiencing life. Understand that people who worry are people who compulsively think about life all the time so they end up being trapped by their own mind and developing an anxiety disorder. Just like if you constantly try to keep control all the time you will eventually lose control and sink into the seemingly bottomless pit of depression.

The key to avoiding both these extremes is to strike out and go for a more conscious lifestyle and in so doing, you learn to offload a great deal of emotional baggage, you recover your natural humanity and learn how to live more effortlessly and simply.

Which brings us to the subject of dream weaving

Dreamweaving is a way of moving towards that more conscious lifestyle by focussing much more on possibilities and learning how to connect your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your dreams, your ideas, your experiences, and everything else that goes through your mind in order to be able to connect and move between different levels or planes of consciousness. It's similar to yoga because it's based on connecting with your environment and others in your environment. But while yoga is based on eastern philosophy and cosmology, meditation and physical exercise, dreamweaving is far more based on language, social interaction, drama, role play and ritual magic.

If you're curious about dreamweaving then you're in the right place because I'm just the person who knows a thing or two about it.