Our conscious mind — believe it or not — is not in charge of our day-to-day behaviour.That claim may seem counter intuitive and contrary to our experience, but it has been demonstrated in controlled experiments time and again. By the time our conscious mind is aware of any particular decision or action, it has already been made or enacted by some other part of our brain.
Our conscious mind — believe it or not — is not in charge of our day-to-day behaviour.That claim may seem counter intuitive and contrary to our experience, but it has been demonstrated in controlled experiments time and again. By the time our conscious mind is aware of any particular decision or action, it has already been made or enacted by some other part of our brain.
Journaling within The Ten Stages – writing down the truth of our feelings, our point of view, our fears, our angers, our hopes, our expectations, our desires, our fantasies, our hatreds, our regrets, our thoughts, our memories, our prejudices, our secret loves, our painful experiences, our humiliations, our past traumas – requires our trust and consent to foster intimacy with ourself and our child within. This self-intimacy is the essence of good contact with our hidden child within. Many of us find it difficult to journal – or journal in a deep and prolonged way – because of the strange new feelings of being emotionally intimate with ourself for the first time. But if we can tolerate the potential discomfort, if you can sit with the truth of who we really are and look at our truth expressed on the page in front of us, then we can nurture a wonderful relationship with our greatest ally: our own true self, the child within!
As we complete the ten stages we awaken with shock at the devastating impact of our traumatisation, and to the costs of our dissociations. We see with heartbreak the decimation of relationships and our original family. We realise with horror that they never grew into their full, conscious capacity, but instead remained wounded, troubled children who were easy to exploit and ready to exploit in turn. And so we rebel, but wildly, unconsciously. We see that our unconscious child within has not only poisoned the planet but poisoned every new generation we mindlessly create. Awakened to this nightmare, we scream with protests and movements of various kinds to stop social deception. As we fight to heal our outer world we begin to heal our inner world—and step toward inner, integrated truth. We begin to sense that we have lost our way and our child hidden within. We seek a better way of being recovered. And as we become increasingly conscious, we start to evolve into a new, true, and sustainable life.
Stagers are in the business of becoming free of their trauma. Our repressed fears from childhood and also the suppression of our creative gifts that were too much for our limited families have been healed and emancipated. The child withins unconscious is cleared and the life force flows freely through our beings. We are filled with the light of consciousness and therefore are recovered. We are a sustainable variation of society since we have learned to live in harmony with ourselves, others, and nature. Through conscious living we build a new creation with ethical social structures that allow us to prosper. We see that all of humanity and nature are interconnected. All of creation is one evolving organism seeking truth, love, and wisdom. As we continue to grow, unfettered by trauma, we are open to new thoughts and new visions. In fact, we start to evolve consciousness, expanding truth and deepening what it means to be human.
Most of us are ruled by trauma—not truth. We are the norm. We remain unconscious of the legacy of dissociation that we carry from our families and ancestors. We are destructive towards ourselves, others, and our planet home. In essence, we are wounded children, seeking to exploit others and the world in order to make up for the deficits of our childhood. We are rapacious and violent—which are expressions of our childhood neglect. We befoul society with impunity. We are not sustainable. We mindlessly procreate, using our own children as a diverting dissociation from the traumas we carry but deny. We hope our children will fulfil our own thwarted dreams, and when this doesn’t happen our children receive our rage. Sadly, this is child abuse and creates yet another generation of troubled people on an already crowded planet. As we continue to lead unconscious lives, we exploit natural and human resources to a breaking point, such that our extinction looms.
