Conscious Dating
Our purpose is simply to help you recognize, understand, allow and love all that you are ..
so that you attract someone who can recognize, understand, allow and love all of you too.
The stars offer you a gateway to this recognition.
From childhood we are conditioned by our parents and society to believe that certain behavior is good and certain behavior is bad. As a consequence we naturally try to suppress all of our bad points. The trouble is that because we have been unconsciously conditioned to be angry, spiteful, judgmental, aggressive, moody, depressed, a liar, a manipulator, or any of a thousand other so called ‘negative’ traits, we unwittingly spend our lives denying many of the very aspects that we are.
If we could just learn to recognize and allow that the identity we portray to the world is just a collection of impersonal learned behaviors and not who we really are, then we would find complete peace. However, since negative traits are universally condemned, most of us are simply too afraid or unwilling to take a close look at our own actions. It’s not considered socially acceptable or ‘spiritual’ to be anything that could be considered remotely bad, therefore we’d just rather not go there at all.
So, millions of us around the world spend millions of pounds reading millions of books and meditating for millions of hours and pursuing equally mind-boggling numbers of spiritual pursuits, so that we can find the illusive state known as ‘enlightenment’. We believe that when we reach this state we will find Nirvana, that all our ‘sins’ will be forgiven and that we will float around all day feeling warm, smiley and lovely, impervious to anything distasteful. We desperately seek this new 'clean' identity because we are unhappy with the one we've got.
Well, it's a lovely romantic idea, but it's not really the answer.
Ironically, the very key to the Oneness and peace that we all innately seek, is the absolute opposite of this approach ... and the key doesn’t lie out there in any book or in any wisdom or any guru, albeit they might guide you in the right direction. It lies much closer to home – in YOU!
There is only one requirement in life for evolution and peace. We have to unearth all those so-called ‘negative’ traits which we unconsciously adopted and have done our best to bury; then accept that they ARE part of our make-up and let them ‘be’ - just be aware of them without making any attempt whatsoever to change them. And we have to be completely, utterly and ruthlessly honest with ourselves about EVERYTHING we do.
It helps to understand that the human psyche can’t distinguish between someone who knowingly kills an ant and someone who commits mass murder, or between someone who tells a little white lie and someone who is pathologically deceitful. To the human psyche, killing is killing and lying is lying. There are no levels or grades.
We are all saints and sinners. We can all be lovely and we can all be horrible. We can all take flowers to someone in hospital and we can all turn a blind eye to the homeless beggar in the street. We can all praise someone for a job well done and we can all criticize our neighbour for their disrespectful actions. We can all be holier-than-thou and we can all point the finger of blame. We can all think lovely thoughts and we can all have hateful ones. This is the human experience. We are, each and every one of us, conditioned by our growing environment to behave in ways that society deems to be less than perfect, and we spend our lives trying to suppress or hide or rid ourselves of these learned responses. Yet, when we stop to realize that none of those behaviors are personal – that we didn’t ask for them but simply got programmed with them – then we can start to look earnestly for the truth of who we are.
When we focus inwardly, it isn’t easy to digest, because we will see things in ourselves that we dislike. Our standard reaction is to fight and argue and deny that we are what we have unearthed. We often project it outwards onto everyone else because we simply find it so painful to acknowledge. We will use every trick in the book and some not even written about, not to own up to anything that might make us feel crappy about ourselves. We will be so immersed in our life stories and self-perceptions that we will genuinely believe everything coming out of our mouths and we will fight to any length to protect our sense of who we are. Unconscious beliefs have a life of their own and they will do anything to survive!
It’s so sad. If we just realized that none of this is personal. None of this is judgment. None of this is blame. There is no need to feel any shame or guilt. It’s not about ‘coming clean’. It’s just an opportunity - an invitation - to look at our programming and recognize how we habitually are in life. For it is the simple recognition and the allowing and the actual ‘being’ of who we are that ultimately releases us energetically from the cage of conditioning which we have been inhabiting our whole lives and lets us move forward.
The route to complete freedom, lies not in some spiritual pursuit or dumbing of the mind, but in fully embracing the darkest parts of us which we have been trained to avoid or suppress, and allowing them to live just as comfortably in our house as the lighter aspects of our character which we have always welcomed. The light and the dark, the yin and the yang are simply opposite sides of the same element. We could not know love without hate. We could not know warmth without cold. We could not know passion without lethargy. We could not know peace without unrest. The path to all that we desire – truth, peace and love – lies not in our obvious perfections which we happily display to the world, but in our hidden imperfections which we ashamedly hide away. Our real beauty is hidden not in the gold but in the dirt.
In the moment that we stop looking outside for answers and start looking within, when we understand that to be a saint we have to be a sinner, when we realize that there is nothing personal about what we do and that it is simply the result of conditioning, then we can step free of the shackles of the ‘identity’ we have been living and live an authentic life.
All the forgiveness, compassion and love we have always wanted to embody and looked for ways to access, appears right before our eyes as part of the process. For the truth is that what we have been searching for all along, is us! WE ARE that forgiveness, compassion and love - only we can’t see it because we are blinded by all the characteristics and behaviors which have been imprinted in our cells and which made us believe that our learned personality was who we really were. Yet, all that we have been up until this point is an illusion. The truth of all we are lies in the recognition of all we have tried not to be.
Our ‘job’, as divine beings, is to become aware of our conditioned patterns of behavior and to integrate them. To notice them and then allow them to be a part of us, rather than try to change them. It’s not about judging, it’s about allowing.
When we embrace life fully and live without any form of denial, it is much easier to spot our habitual patterns. And when we are present with them, rather than running away from them, healing happens naturally. The presence or consciousness that we all are, recognizes what was once unconscious (what we were once unaware of) and this creates an energetic shift in our bodies. There is a merging of the divine with the human … we bring heaven to earth.
With each of these shifts, the union grows stronger. Our human elements are integrated into our divine element and our natural state of love, now less hidden behind our unintentional façade, shines through ever more strongly. Each shift takes us closer to our real identity, and the yearning to come home is so strong that we instinctively spend our lives looking for the answers that will complete the journey. Yet in truth the searching is not necessary, for as electromagnetic beings, we automatically attract the people who are reflections of ourselves into our lives, so that we can see clear examples of who we are right in front of our eyes. Life could not be any kinder or more perfect than to provide these clues consistently and in a variety of guises, until we eventually ‘get’ what we are looking for.
The outcome, or the ‘awakening’ as it is often referred to, is the integration of the lower human consciousness with the higher divine consciousness. At this point, instead of looking for love outside of us, we live as love embodied .. and in so doing, the love we have always searched for is automatically attracted to us. Ultimately, all love must come home to itself.
So, why is this article called Conscious Dating? Well, because dating and relationships are the best way to both have fun AND take a good honest look at ourself through the eyes of another person. They’ll spot all sorts of tendencies in us and vice verce, although of course what is being spotted is only what we haven’t yet recognized in ourself. It’s a beautiful opportunity to spend quality time with another person and get to know who we both are in the process. It’s always a ‘win win’ situation as both parties will always glean important information about themselves – just so long as we remember that whatever gets discovered is not personal. It’s just an unearthing of an unconscious pattern, so we should be grateful for anything we learn about ourself in the process.
Relationships are a gift, so be conscious while you date. It’s the path to true love.
© copyright www.alovingspace.com 2008