In my explorations of the POWER OF INTENTION and using the MATRIX as a metaphor, Wayne Dyer is cast in the role of Morpheus. His teachings challenge us to take either the red pill or the blue pill, and choose to remain in the life we currently know or to experience something much more powerful.
If you choose the pill revealing the working of the Matrix, you need to prepare your mind to suspend disbelief. In this post, I want you consider suffering and how this condition is one you have chosen. Challenge yourself to consider what follows below.
Dyer teaches that our suffering comes from our egos separating from our higher selves. Our higher selves know that we are fully formed, beautiful, sacred and blessed. We are already part of the GodHead, and knowing this is the soul’s liniment; a comforting balm soothing the pain which arises when we remove ourselves from the warmth of union with the Creator. However, when our focus becomes locked on Others’ perception of us, we inevitably develop feelings of inadequacy.
When learning about the Law of Attraction, Manifesting, and the teachings of The Secret, one of the first steps is cultivating and maintaining a positive attitude connected to the belief that we can truly have what our heart desires. Most would also agree that these initial steps are also the most difficult. Perhaps, it is so difficult because when many people consciously begin manifesting their intentions, they also happen to be in the midst of personal difficulties. That's OK, because to began manifestation, you will learn that you are a complete being with sacred truths within you. The struggle to recognize this is a rebirth of sort, and if painful, well worth the labor.
Let’s consider for a moment how we relinquish our sacred selves to Others as it relates to existential thought. The philosophical school of existentialism, particularly as it is articulated by Jean Paul Sartre, I believe has similarities
The LOA and manifestation teachings are based in ancient spirituality. For many who are not ready to give themselves over a GOD centered world, this is reason enough to turn back from learning the true nature of the Matrix. Instead of believing this spirituality is empowering, many fear that acceptance will be the relinquishing of free will. If this is you, then prepare to read between the lines of a decidedly humanistic school of philosophical thought.
This separation of self and consciousness and the rejection of the self as simply self-consciousness provide the framework for Sartre's greatest philosophical treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943). Its structure is unabashedly Cartesian, consciousness ("being-for-itself") on the one side, the existence of mere things ('being-in-itself") on the other. (The phraseology comes from Hegel). But Sartre does not fall into the Cartesian trap of designating these two types of being as separate "substances." Instead, Sartre describes consciousness as "nothing"--"not a thing" but an activity, "a wind blowing from nowhere toward the world." Sartre often resorts to visceral metaphors when developing this theme (e.g., "a worm coiled in the heart of being"), but much of what he is arguing is familiar to philosophical readers in the more metaphor-free work of Kant, who also warned against the follies ("paralogisms") of understanding consciousness as itself a (possible) object of consciousness rather than as the activity of constituting the objects of consciousness. (As the lens of the camera can never see itself--and in a mirror only sees a reflection of itself--consciousness can never view itself as a consciousness and is only aware of itself--"for itself"--through its experience of objects). Ontologically, one might think of "nothingness" as "no-thing-ness," a much less outrageous suggestion than those that would make it an odd sort of thing.
It is through the nothingness of consciousness and its activities that negation comes into the world, our ability to imagine the world other than it is and the inescapable necessity of imagining ourself other than we seem to be. And because consciousness is nothingness, it is not subject to the rules of causality. Central to the argument of Being and Nothingness and Sartre's insistence on the primacy of human freedom is his insistence that consciousness cannot be understood in causal terms. It is always self-determining and, as such, "it always is what it is not, and is not what it is"--a playful paradox that refers to the fact that we are always in the process of choosing.
Consciousness is "nothing," but the self is always on the way to being something. Throughout our lives we accumulate a body of facts that are true of us--our "facticity"--but during our lives we remain free to envision new possibilities to reform ourself and to reinterpret our facticity in the light of new projects and ambitions--our "transcendence." This indeterminancy means that we can never be anything, and when we try to establish ourselves as something particular--whether a social role (policeman, waiter) or a certain character (shy, intellectual, cowardly)--we are in "bad faith." Bad faith is erroneously viewing ourself as something fixed and settled (Sartre utterly rejects Freud and his theory of the unconscious determination of our personalities and behavior), but it is also bad faith to view oneself as being of infinite possibilities and ingore the always restrictive facts and circumstances within which all choice must be made. On the one hand, we are always trying to define ourself; on the other hand we are always free to break away from what we are, and always responsible for what we have made of ourselves. But there is no easy resolution or "balance" between facticity and freedom, rather a kind of dialectic or tension. The result is our frustrated desire to be God, to be both in-itself and for-itself. But this is not so much blasphemy as an expression of despair, a form of ontological original sin, the impossibility of being both free and what we want to be.
Life for Sartre is yet more complicateed. There is a third basic ontological category, on a part with the being-in-itself and being-for-itself and not derivative of them. He calls it "being-for-others." To say that it is not derivative is to insist that our knowledge of others is not inferred, e.g., by some argument by analogy, from the behavior of others, and we ourself are not wholly constituted by our self-determinations and the facts about us. Sartre gives us a brutal but familiar everyday example of our experience of being-for-others in what he calls "the look." Someone catches us "in the act" of doing somethig humiliating, and we find ourself defining ourself (probably also resisting that definition) in their terms. In his Saint Genet (1953), Sartre describes such a conversion of the ten-year-old Jean Genet into a thief. So, too, we tend to "catch" one another in terms that are often unflattering. But these judgments become an essential and ineluctable ingredient in our sense of ourselves, and they too lead to conflicts--indeed, conflicts so basic and so frustrating that in his play No Exit (1943) Sartre has one of his characters utter the famous line, "Hell is other people."
In his later works, notably his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1958-59), Sartre turned increasingly to politics and, in particular, toward a defense of Marxism on existentialist principles. This entailed rejecting materialist determinism, but it also required a new sense of solidarity (or what Sartre had wistfully called, following Heidegger, Mitsein or "being with others"). Thus in his later work he struggled to find a way of overcoming the conflict and insularity he had described in Being and Nothingness. Not surprisingly (given his constant political activities) he found it in revolutionary engagement. Consonant with his rejection of bourgeois selfhood, Sartre turned down the 1964 Nobel prize for literature.
--Excerpt from The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosopy, edited by Robert Audi
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