THE GLASS IS HALF FULL

Do you want things to be different?

What do you think might happen if you choose to let go of baggage you've been carrying around all your life. You know the kind of baggage I mean – the thoughts and emotions that, no matter which countries you migrate to, which careers you change, which relationships you walk away from, which situations you walk into thinking “this time it's different” – the emotional, intellectual and social baggage that keeps turning up on your doorstep just when things start to get a bit difficult.

Exercising choice in the way you see things makes a difference – in fact it makes all the difference in the world.

It was not long – not very long at all –before it became apparent that I was not going to be the textbook “eldest son” my parents envisaged. I had a rebellious streak that quickly turned sneaky when thwarted. Despite being wonky-legged and not at all athletic, I had two near-death experiences before the age of thirteen. I grew up chanting “I am not worthy”, “There's something wrong with me” and “I'll never amount to anything” mantras to myself, loudly reinforced by my loving parents who sought to thereby motivate me to be different and better than I appeared to be. I'm sure it wasn't deliberate, but I was squirted into school with a snobbish attitude of being morally and mentally superior to the other kids, a drastic distortion that was guaranteed to make me easy fodder for every school bully. Other than a biting wit and an air of martyred superiority, I had no defences. I just wanted to have friends and be friends, but had no idea of how to go about that. I had my Peter Pan-ish dreams of an enchanted existence violently quashed, giving credence to my negatively programmed belief system.

It wasn't my parents' fault. Their childhoods had not equipped them for social success. Parents cannot pass on to their children what they don't have. No-one can. So I was never taught the simple truth that we become what we dwell on. A strictly religious upbringing gave me an awareness of a spiritual dimension to human life, but I had no chance to contemplate or understand our birthright of god-ness – that would have been a sin of pride. It never occurred to me until I was introduced to the idea in my late thirties that we attract what we are, what we think, and what we feel day after day. Given my circumstances, it was easy to fall into a victim consciousness from time to time, wallowing internaslly in a perpetual state of powerlessness trying to win something and be somebody. One thing simply led to another. I struggled, and with every struggle, more struggle seemed to find me.

Finally, my wife left me after 18 years of marriage, and my whole world exploded and fell apart, with no handholds anywhere. I fell into an abyss so dark and deep I never really found the bottom.

Forced to do some work on myself by a horrible business failure, I had already done some personal growth work – enough to realise that “better” was possible, but that mind-gym worked – except sometimes, then no longer worked – except sometimes. No, mind control was not “the answer”. There had to be more to life than what I'd come to so far.

I am not sure exactly when I actually “woke up.” Although there were, and still are, significant “A-hah!” moments, it was more of a gradual staging for me than a sudden awakening. It was more like coming out of a deep coma than just waking up in the mornings. I slowly learned to assimilate each new “got-it” as it came along, and to take each of my life circumstances step by step and play them — like a hand of cards – differently.

This wasn't like change, though. Surely, the old programming and habits were still there, but this was like setting them off to one side and re-building from the foundations up, discovering new programmes and habits along the way, and finding a new use for the old stuff. This was not change; this was Evolution, starting again from amoeba......but this time doing it with eyes wide open in conscious awareness and with an acute knowing of what no longer works.

Above all, I learned Awareness techniques to increase the amount of time I spend in the Here and Now.
We experience reality when we live it uncritically in the now. When we're off in the dead past or the imagined future, usually with voice-over commentary, direct experience is no longer available. Our “now” becomes bloated with Thinking About – thinking about remembers think-abouts (past), or imagined think-abouts (future). We are now at least at least 4 stages removed from anything real, which continues to flow by unabated and totally unexperienced while we are otherwise distracted.

We summon into our existence exactly what we are thinking and feeling and believing in the moment. And what we are thinking and feeling about in the moment are repetitive streams of faulty perceptions, beliefs, concepts, judgements and opinions from a past that we got wrong then anyway. That's why life keeps on repeating itself, and why we keep on doing similar things, hoping for a different result. The cast list may change, but the plots and dramas remain pretty much the same. In the meantime, life as it really is just passes us by – unnoticed.

Contemplate this: What am I calling into my life right now? What outdated, corrupted, virus-ridden conscious and subconscious programs am I running on right now? What mental and emotional baggage am I clinging to? Is my life half-empty, or half-full? More importantly, what is even “in the glass” and how long have I been holding on to it? 

Six or seven years ago I had major surgery and woke up on complete life support. Everything from the past was gone, the future hadn't occurred to me yet, and in the here & now I had to construct something from scratch. Since that moment, my experience has been a direct one of noticing once-upon-a-time faculties returning and some new ones showing up in the empty space created by the total erasure. I'm blessed to feel that my glass is definitely “filling up”.

I know that a “half-full” consciousness is possible, and I know how that perception has transformed the way I see and deal with the world. I also know that you don't have to have quintuple-bypass surgery to get to this realisation. There are much easier, less expensive, less dangerous and gentler ways to be “born again”.

Simply choose to let go of empty habits like “the way I've always done it” and “this is just how I am”. Let them go. Create space. Do not be afraid of having Nothing to replace the old. Trust that your life has always known where it wanted to go, and has been waiting patiently (mostly), for you to wake up to yourself. Let a very different kind of Certainty, a Certainty of Not-Knowing be your new status quo. In a new atmosphere of Possibility, trust that doors and windows will open unto you, inviting you to play and explore in a land of “I always wanted to....”