Scribblings Empowerment Blog

Moving Forward

4/27/2023

Can you believe we have already passed the two decades mark into this new millennium? I can remember the hoopla around the turn of the millennium as if it were only yesterday! Then I recall all that has taken place since then. Looking back, as I pointed out last week, often brings up a series of regrets. This is not a good thing because it takes you back into an old energy, an old way of perceiving and thinking.

Why does this matter? It matters because it can drag YOU backward. It can dredge up and activate negative attitudes you've been working to release.

We are in a time of great change as humans. The key to permanent change is to recognize you cannot hold onto the past. Release it in whatever form it takes. It may be represented through:

hoarding of things to keep the past safe
attachment to memories of past efforts to reach goals that failed
attachment to an image you have of yourself based on experiences and what you believe are others' ideas of you
constant stirring up of old fears that emerged from the past.

Can you see how ALL these things have a vibration or a feeling attached to them that holds you in the past? How can you expect to move into a NEW way of thinking, feeling and responding if you refuse to shed the OLD?

It's not possible for the same reason you can't put new wine into old wineskins. If you truly desire change in your life, then you are saying you want to let go of the old understanding and the old relationship you had with life. You want to vibrate or interact with life at a higher level. You want to see greater possibilities and reach for your highest potential.

You cannot do this except by looking forward. You can continue to metaphorically look over your shoulder by hanging onto the past out of fear of losing who you are, but you won't have the strength to move forward. Why? Because your baggage will be too heavy for you to carry!

Scribblings on Empowerment

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Stop Looking Over Your Shoulder!

4/20/2023

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A friend of mine was doing a training run for a marathon in December and made the mistake of looking back over his shoulder while he was running. Now he has a severely sprained ankle. It reminded me of what I’ve often told people whom I have counseled for years: You can't move forward if you spend all your time looking over your shoulder. Of course, I was speaking metaphorically, but it seems it holds true in the physical world as well.

What does it mean to stop looking over your shoulder? Well, if you're in a relationship, it points to your mentally comparing the current relationship to past ones, whether they were lousy or wonderful. Either way, looking over your shoulder prevents you from being objective about a current situation.

Within a relationship, looking over your shoulder can refer to times when you were in a conflict with your significant other and instead of dealing with what your feelings are at the moment, you spend all your time pointing out situations in the past to prove your point. Unfortunately, it’s a point that may cost you dearly in the relationship. Few relationships survive scorekeeping.

Within your own psychology, looking over your shoulder refers to an emotional attachment to your past life experiences. If you are afraid to move forward, whether personally or career-wise, because your past experiences have never worked out well, then you are short-changing yourself. You should, of course, intellectually assess what you may have overlooked in the past or what attitudes may have stood in your way. However, this should be done with the intent of moving forward, not wallowing in the past. This means you leave the emotions attached to the past in the past.

So, what are two important things to remember about this?

1) Make sure that all your thoughts regarding past experiences are viewed in terms of how they can best serve your current desire;

2) Stay clear of the negative emotions (anger, poor-me's, etc.) that are attached to your past experiences. This will not serve you in the present.

Scribblings on Empowerment

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A Vicious Cycle

4/15/2023

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I had some thoughts about the impossible conflict that arises when thinkers try to reason with radicals who have been programmed to “think” only from their emotions. However, trying to put it into words was frustrating. It is a vicious cycle feeding the frustration of reasoned thinkers and feeding the radicals through repeated opportunities to activate their programming. It will continue until we implement whatever action is necessary to find solutions and put a stop to the self-serving greed that is being touted as the high road in this country today.

This is not about religion, whether Christian, Islam, or whatever. That is being used as an emotional weapon. This is really about basic human values – empathy, compassion, cooperation, kindness, forgiveness, tolerance, love among others. Such values transcend any single religion interpreted by Man. If your faith is based on a higher power or even if one has no such belief, human values still arise from within.

When we forget this, we lose the best part of ourselves. Then we attack our fellow man, using whatever excuses we can find, flimsy though they may be.

No one has the right to determine whether someone else is “acceptable” in the eyes of their God. If everyone in the world, Christian, Muslim, whatever, spent their time trying to express the basic human values in their individual worlds and less time trying to elevate themselves to the position of judge, there would be little opportunity for all the enmity we have today.

Why is this so hard to do? Because people are so afraid they’re not going to measure up on some invisible test, whether spiritual or worldly. So they spend all their time measuring themselves against others, which usually leads to trying to prove their way is the right way. This generally leads to violence. No one likes a bully, but the truth is that bullies are everywhere. Religion, money, psychological needs – these are some of the triggers that activate radical behaviors.

Are we doomed? Not if we don’t let ourselves get trapped in this vicious cycle. Reasoning with those who are incapable of seeing anything beyond their personal needs is not a path we can follow. We must turn our attention away from the noisemakers and work on solutions.

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Woke or Asleep?

4/13/2023

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History

Woke is a term that we see more and more frequently in this century. Merriam-Webster included it in its lexicon in 2017 as “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” In that same year, the Oxford English Dictionary added it as “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice.” Both indicate it emerged from the phrase stay woke.

The phrase stay woke itself traces back to a dialect used by African Americans in earlier times to indicate those who were self-aware and striving for a better life as they questioned the dominant paradigm. We don’t really know how far back this phase was part of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). We do know that Lead Belly used it in his 1938 song "Scottsboro Boys”: “best stay woke, keep their eyes open.”

In 1962 Author William M. Kelley used the lone term woke in an essay titled “If You’re Woke, You Dig It.” His entire essay focused on the richness of black idioms. It was a cultural description. He never intended woke to be a battle cry.

The shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, of Michael Brown in 2014 began the transition of the phrase stay woke into the lone term woke becoming a paradigm of its own in the arena of social and political injustices. A year earlier in 2013, Black Lives Matter had launched in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, Trayvon Martin’s accused murderer. This sparked BLM to build the Black Live Matter Network. Since then, the term woke had become more prevalent.

Secular Transformation

In today’s divisive times, the term woke has been transformed in the global vernacular as a summation of one’s bipartisan stance on social justice theories and racial issues. The Right uses it to denigrate the Left's adoption of the term to highlight more progressive thinking. So, despite itself, it has become a battle cry, not only for the African American community, but also for the left-leaning populace.

Spiritual Philosophies Behind Being Awake

Let’s take a moment to explain a couple of perspectives. Being awake has been part of spiritual philosophies in one form or other since the beginning of time.

Buddhism is non-theistic, but it does accept that meditation, concentration, and training the mind within a well-developed spiritual practice leads to attaining enlightenment. Does this mean they are woke? Well, not in the social and political context. Enlightenment is a compilation of the basic concepts of their discipline. It includes nirvana (the extinction of craving), Bodhi (awakening from the sleep of ignorance), and Buddhahood (complete awakened state).

Certain Christian faiths believe that the teachings of Jesus tell us that we must let go of our attachments to worldly things. This means not just physical things, but beliefs we carry with us that stem from worldly feedback, beliefs that hold us back from accepting our potential as “spiritual beings having a human experience” as Teilhard said.

The philosophers Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and their student Maurice Nicoll taught the concept of humans being asleep to who they are and the need for waking up. The process for accomplishing this is called The Work. In other words, learning to live one’s world from the within to the without, instead of the other way around. Learning to move from conditioned reactions to conscious choices. The difficulty with this is that we don’t always recognize that we are conditioned, hence the term The Work.

So Why Is the Term Woke Not Having the Hoped-for Impact?

The use of the term woke in the media and by politicians as a noun encompassing either a set of moral beliefs held dear or a set of beliefs held in contempt completely strips away any effectiveness. Why? Because it has recently become a political gimmick.

By definition, as I mentioned, woke means being attentive to social and political injustices. Simply striving to make everyone aware of these issues and trying to force change on society is quite simply a Band-Aid effort.

Until people set aside those puffed-up pictures of themselves, all those preconceived notions without a factual basis (prejudices) and fixed inclinations (biases) that preclude fairness, nothing will change for the long-term. You can see this in the way the Right and the Left are slinging their prejudices around in the media, the Right even going so far as to label legislation as “woke” as a reason to defeat it.

Such thoughtless attitudes work against us and those around us. It divides us into camps. Psychologically or spiritually, whichever is your preference, this is a dead-end path. It creates more and more negative energy, fueling fear and discord. This keeps us blind to our potentials as individuals and as a nation.

We are not going to progress through enacting controls or loosening them. Only through waking up from our self-imposed sleep as individuals is going to effect permanent change. When a person allows life or their family or friends or political harlots to determine who they are, what they believe, then they are asleep.

So, how do you go about waking up? For starters, just imagine if you will, what your family life, your work, your friends, your social groups would be like if you refused to allow yourself to get involved in the bickering, gossiping, or fearmongering and never said negative things about others. What if you tried to put yourself in their shoes instead of beating up on them? It would be hard (again, that’s why the process is called The Work), but it would first ignite a change in you and gradually change some of the others in your circle of influence.

Now imagine, instead of everyone today fighting over who’s the most Woke, Americans began to practice waking up as well. With a greater sense of Self, people began to engage in critical thinking, which is “self-directed, self-disciplined, self-monitored, and self-corrective thinking.”

It wouldn’t happen overnight, of course, but the power of those leading the charge for negativity would gradually diminish. We could possibly find ourselves in the highest state of balance and harmony we’ve experienced as a nation since our inception.

I’m fully aware there will be naysayers to this practice. It is inevitable because those who are so deeply entrenched in their craving for status in the world, whether as someone in power or as one of their followers, are fearful of letting go of these things. It has become their identity. Letting go is like a form of death to them. In truth, it is their chance to experience freedom.

Conclusion

The idea of stay woke or being alert to social and political injustices is important. However, trying to use control or trying to “plug holes in the dam” is not the answer. This nation must experience a positive change in consciousness, one free of fear and anger. The enemy is not “out there.” The enemy is within each of us.

*First published on my old Medium account in 2022.

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Is Unity Possible in America?

4/8/2023

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“Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and test of our civilization.” – Mahatma Gandhi

There are plenty of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers who have worked hard to understand and embrace the truth that “we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The other side of this view is that we are merely human beings having a spiritual experience. The latter is the reason for the divisiveness that exists around the world today. Seeing ourselves as merely humans or as humans who must follow certain precepts or face punishment after death has throughout history spawned those who either create those rules or interpret existing philosophies to control, influence or regulate the conduct of others.

Believing that we are spiritual beings having a human experience opens us up to the vastness of God or whatever you believe created the Universe. No matter how much one denies the existence of a Higher Power, at some point as one winds their way back through the history of the Universe, there was a creative moment that lies far beyond our ability to envision as we experience this human life. Realizing this opens our minds to a broader perspective on the Universe and or role in this life.

The Forces in Our Lives
Why does this matter? It matters because it helps one to understand the forces that exist in our world, forces that provide the structure of our existence and ultimately its nature.

Do you recall Newton’s Laws of Motion? Newton observed that an object remains static unless another force acts upon it. He also observed that a moving object doesn’t stray from its path unless another force causes it to do so. (Newton’s First Law)

In his Second Law of Motion, he observed that the movement of an object only accelerates or decelerates when another force acting on it is either greater or lesser, respectively, than the force of the moving object.

In his Third Law of Motion, Newton’s familiar axiom is often quoted: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” This means that when a force is applied to an object, the force of that object pushes back in an equal, but opposite amount.

In spiritual philosophy, we identify these laws as First Force, Second Force, and Third Force (not linearly related however to the numbering of Newton’s Laws). In the world of our personal creativity, this translates in simple terms to the following. First Force is your desire for something in your life. Second Force is made up of all your doubts, the garbage you’ve picked up along the way that denigrates your dream. This is where the “equal and opposite reaction” comes in. Your dream is static. So what do you need to break the stalemate?

You need a Third Force, which is also called a Conciliatory Force. This force involves the nature of your choices in life. These choices can either support your desire or support your doubts. The choices you make will remove your desire from a static, wishful-thinking status and either accelerate or decelerate the manifestation of your desire. These forces not only apply to our personal desires, they also apply to the collective desires of a group of like minds.

How Does This Relate to Our Ability to Achieve Unity?
Understanding how the forces influence what we think and do both as individuals and collectively can have a tremendous impact on resolving the divisiveness in the world. It is about Consciousness. This is a word that is often considered New Age or just a word that indicates you’re not in a coma. Instead, one’s consciousness is the opening of oneself to the flow of energy that is Source or God, that Higher Power we cannot define. Everyone has consciousness, and it is always changing. However, your choices will determine the Conciliatory Force you apply to yourself and thus, the direction of your path. As noted, this also applies to those of like-mind.

If you insist on seeing yourself as a human having a spiritual experience, your path toward increased awareness decelerates. Your contribution to the vibrational level of consciousness of the human race serves as an oppositional force.

If instead you begin embracing yourself as a spiritual being, a viable expression of that unknown Source, not only will your path toward increased consciousness accelerate, your contribution to the vibrational level of consciousness of the human race will move us all closer to unity.

The reason I’ve approached this subject is because of all the things taking place in our society these days. The actions of those who see themselves as merely humans and thus feel the need to exercise control over others to come out on top is a perfect scenario for illustrating the workings of First and Second Forces. From my perspective, First Force is those people who desire peace and equality and love. Second Force is those people who are filled with fear, insecurity, and anger and are letting these negative emotions determine their actions. Their fear is inciting their need to control everyone else, to keep things from changing. Why do you think they keep talking about the “good old days?”

The important issue at this time is for us to be fully aware of Third Force, for it will determine which force, First or Second, becomes our collective path. As noted, Third Force is established through our choices. In other words, if those of us whose First Force is to seek unity allow those who favor divisiveness (our equal and opposite Second Force) to catch us up in their negative emotions, our Third Force will become weighted toward the intentions of Second Force. It will determine the path the world is on. Recall what Newton said about how a moving force does not change its path unless another force causes it to do so. Our desire for peace and love (First Force) can be knocked off its path by our reactions to Second Force or vice versa, depending on our choices.

So What’s the Deal with Baby Boomers and Gen Xers?
In listening to the news these days, I hear a lot of people lumping all Baby Boomers and Gen Xers in the same category, i.e., the root of our troubles. There’s also a lot of lumping going on with the different races. This contributes to divisiveness and increases the power of Second Force. From a spiritual perspective, despite the obstacles they encountered, many of those born before 1980 contributed a great deal to a rise in consciousness, one that has spawned in the Millennials and the later generations a greater awareness of their value as spiritual beings having a human experience.

Of course, I’m sure the first thought that popped in your head was this: Then why are we still in the middle of fighting for our lives? It may seem inane, but we are at a crucial point in our existence in this country and on this planet. With the advent of the newer generations, the two forces mentioned have reached a schism between their two perspectives on life. This is when choices will be made. Will we reach out and draw to us all those who support peace and equality and love so that this First Force is able to manifest in our world? Or instead, do we engage in fighting fear, insecurity, and anger with those same negative emotions? If we do, all is lost. Don’t doubt for a second that those I defined as Second Force will fight for their lives to maintain the path they are on.

There is a popular saying that when it seems life is falling apart, it may actually be falling into place better than expected. These are the times we are in. This is why we must stop drawing lines in the sand between generations or races. We must look into the hearts of those around us if we want to bring out the desire driving First Force and manifest unity in America and around the world.

As Gandhi said, “Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and test of our civilization.” There is a clear path. Focus on the things that will make change. Reaching out to all those who need to be seen, no matter their race or age, make our voices clear as to our goals, and make sure every citizen is helped to reach their voting place, and everyone knows how important it is to participate in this change in a positive way.

©2023 Dannye Williamsen

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Are You Proactive in Your Life?

4/6/2023

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Are you proactive in your life? Do you take the initiative to make decisions about what you want to experience, or do you just react to circumstances?

Spiritual psychology teaches that we are responsible for the conditions in our lives. In other words, what we are experiencing is the result of the decisions, the choices, we have made. Of course, we can't control all the world "out there," but we can control the responses we have to it. This is an ability with which we are all equipped from birth—our ability to choose our response to life.

When we use our response-ability to decide on how we are going to feel or think or act, we experience more peace, more harmony. Does this mean everything will come up roses? No, it doesn't. It just means we are learning how to dis-identify from those circumstances or people so we don't hand over our personal power by letting other people or circumstances determine our choices for us.

So, if we don't choose to be proactive, what are we doing? We are reacting to life. We are applying yesterday's answers to today's circumstances. Why would we do this? Because we are not mindful. We are not awake and living in the Now. We have allowed ourselves to fall asleep on our spiritual journey by "resting on our spiritual laurels."

Our spiritual journey is life-long, 24/7. Our response-ability is one of our greatest tools. Using it wisely eases the pain we inflict upon ourselves and allows us to embrace all the good that awaits us.

Scribblings on Empowerment

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Dannye Williamsen

I have been studying the human psyche and its wonderful and often frustrating journey for over four decades. It was only natural that my love of writing and teaching became part of this journey.

My writings are dedicated to those who are willing to search outside the box for meaning in their lives, who are willing to shift their view of the world just enough to recognize they are unique expressions, and who are willing to do the inner work to improve their understanding of who they are.

Moving Forward

Stop Looking Over Your Shoulder!

A Vicious Cycle

Woke or Asleep?

Is Unity Possible in America?

Are You Proactive in Your Life?

Dannye Williamsen

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