Enheartenment / Personhood / A Step Deeper

A Step Deeper

Who is the "real," most "authentic" and "emotionally mature" you? And what do "real," "authentic," and "emotionally mature" actually mean? How does "emotional maturity" translate to what we call true self-esteem? And furthermore, is there a universal path that can lead us to create ever-deepening states of the realness and self-authenticity of emotional maturity? Such is offered as EBE or Emotional Body Enlightenment, Theohumanity’s practice for the enlightenment of the human emotional body.

One timeless truth so many of our modern psychological perspectives have forgotten is that it is only in our willingness to confront and experience the fullest reality of our pain that we create the capacity for the fullest experience of our joy. In fact, many of our traditional therapeutic modalities maintain outright that we indeed do not have to descend into the depths of our emotional pain in order to "heal."

But as Gibran reminds us, 'Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?' The confusion revolves around the notion of what actually constitutes "healing". Unfortunately, the obvious truth that the absence of a negative is not the same as the presence of a positive, is forgotten in the rush to alleviate the symptoms of our pain in our instant gratification- seeking culture. Simply reducing the level of our conscious pain or distress by choosing not to dwell with it, using drugs, or employing attitudinal, philosophical, mental, or even spiritualized clarifications to upholster over it is not, and will never be, equivalent to learning how to create an ever-increasing state of joy, emotional maturity, and authentic self-worthiness.

Therapies that teach proper therapy for psycho emotional congestion lie in cognitive solutions, transcendence of negative emotions, self-controlled behavioral modification, eastern expanded consciousness meditative states, new age psychospiritual combination experiences, or mood-altering drug solutions may thus reduce the conscious pressure or outer symptoms of our emotive distress, but will never allow us to create the deepest wells of our capacity because they circumvent the depth of our deepest conflicts, and do not heal them. None of these widely-accepted therapeutic solutions actually lead us to deal with the reality of our inner hidden pain, and only deepen the valley out of which we must one day climb if we wish to really heal.

EBE is based on the idea that children's requirement for sufficient love and emotional nourishment lies in their ability to feel their caregivers feel what they are feeling while they are feeling it, an invisible language of emotive connectedness that the child feels caregivers "get" them at a deep level far before their inner truth of being manifests as outer behaviors. The lack of this dynamic is the seed for our inability to emotionally digest the traumas of childhood and their persistence into adulthood as problematic patterns of addictions, medications, and unfulfilled potentials.

EBE maintains this language of emotive vibratory connectedness children need from caregivers is impeded by one dynamic: the lack of emotional maturity in parents. In EBE, emotional maturity is defined as a state of self-worthiness-based open-hearted congruence between one's inner emotive states and their admission or expression outwardly. Such a state cannot be created by means of willful, attitudinal, intellectual, philosophical, spiritual, or chemical means. It can only be attained by the gradual healing of the emotional body such that the inauthentic Strategic Self of a person that exists by default until emotional maturity is attained, slowly but surely gives way to the capacity of our self-authenticity that lies buried beneath its facade.

By contrast, our Strategic Selfhood, the person whom we experience as ourselves in our present version of self, prevents this kind of inner-to-outer congruent expression of our emotional truths, and instead edits who we are and what we truly feel moment-to-moment in order to strategically minimize rejection and pain and maximize love and approval in life. This strategy was learned in childhood by children imprinting upon their experience of their caregivers own personal strategic forms of selfhood. It is so universally accepted as the only means to get what we seem to need in life, its essence and effects remain invisible to even the most astute psychological, philosophical, sociological, anthropological, and spiritual paradigms of the human condition that have striven to diagnose and ameliorate the cause of our suffering for millennia.

Not only is this spectacularly obvious truth that suffering is always emotional in nature missed by so many experts, it also means that our suffering will only respond to emotional medicine, and not the cognitive, attitudinal, behavioral, philosophical, chemical, or transcendental medicines that have been prescribed for it for so long. As such, we need homeopathic emotional medicine for our emotional suffering, not allopathic cognitive, attitudinal, behavioral, philosophical, chemical, or transcendental medicine. If such allopathic means were going to work to transform ourselves they would have worked by now, given the millennia for which they've been prescribed. That they haven't means there is something intrinsic missing in the paradigms that try to alleviate it by such means.

That missing piece lies in both a non-awareness of the Strategic Self and the hold it has on all of us, and the lack of seeing into the architecture of the primary emotional body that lies upstream of both our mental and physical bodies. EBE sees the emotional body as "sandwiched" between our spiritual bodies and our mental and physical bodies, which explains why even "upstream" directed spiritual effort cannot ever fully address our suffering because it either bypasses or ignores the presence of the emotional body in its treatments, teaching instead that the suffering in our emotional body can be transcended by spiritual effort and thus does not need to be healed in its own emotional domain.

As such, the Strategic Self is itself the smoking gun that explains why we simply have not been aware of the fact that the very agent that tries to design psychological, intellectual, philosophical, sociological, anthropological, medical-chemical, behavioral, or spiritual interventions or ameliorations of our suffering is itself the actual cause of the suffering, because the agent is itself the unhealed Strategic Self invisibly embedded in the designers of all those other paradigmatic expressions, including spiritual masters. This is the true explanation why the symptoms of our persistent emotional congestion keep returning no matter how hard we try to treat them with these other means.

In EBE, then, the dethroning of our Strategic Self and its replacement by our emotionally mature self-authenticity requires both a clear picture of the architecture of the emotional body and an interventional process based on that picture that allows us to heal, and not just treat, our suffering in the emotional domain in which it exists.

In these ways, virtually no philosophical or psychological theory that purports to give guidance on proper parenting sees through to the necessity of caregiver self-authenticity as the key to proper parenting, instead largely focusing on the intentions and actions of parents and not the state of their emotional maturity. Psychology offers virtually no substantive reference either for what emotional maturity is, how to attain it, or articulating it as being the proper goal of any therapy, instead of the coping it can only do to help us deal with the true cause of our almost all of our suffering.

According to EBE, real parenting has almost nothing to do with what parents do or don't do, and more with the congruence between what parents feel inside themselves and the appropriate admission and-or expression of those inner emotions outwardly.

In a clinically applicable sense, children are born authentic, in that here is virtually 100% congruence between what they feel inwardly and the pure expression of that outwardly. Because of this, they are able to read out the true and authentic feeling-tones of parents' with more alacrity and accuracy than almost all parents are able to. Yet most of us do not experience parents outwardly and congruently admitting or expressing their true internal themes of hurt, anxiety, rage, control, depression, shame, self-criticism and the voice of their emotionally inbred defenses. Instead children experience these themes being strategically held back from expression or expressed in compensatory terms by caregivers.

For example, if a child feels a caregiver hurting, they will usually experience that hurt being denied by the caregiver and instead expressed as anxiety or rage. Or they may feel a parent feel rage, but instead experience that rage as control or depression in a caregiver unable or unwilling to purely express the rage they feel toward the real object they are enraged by and not its trigger event or person.

Because children are so emotionally porous, they thus absorb or internalize the unexpressed or unconscious emotive themes that lie undigested in parent's emotional bodies, thus feeling the feelings for their parents up to a certain point, where they then must repress them in order to carry on. And so, the cycle that seeds disownment of authentic selfhood and growth of the Strategic Self gets repeated for another generation. It is the presence of caregivers' unexpressed or unconscious emotive themes internalized by children that then become an emotional weight they learn to carry and then need to find compensatory behaviors to relieve that weight.

In other words, children do not encounter truly emotionally mature authentically-expressing parents, and instead encounter caregivers themselves confused about how they really feel, ashamed of what they really feel, guilty about expressing what they really feel, or confused about how to express what they really feel. This disconnect between what children feel caregivers feel purely but which caregivers either do not feel as clearly or even if they do, do not admit or express authentically, makes reality extremely unsafe for children.

Another way of saying this is that when children can't feel their caregivers feel, admit, or express their own true inner feelings in a congruent manner, children then can't feel their caregivers feel them either, because children are nothing but beings of authentic feelings and their congruent expression!

Thus, since children do not experience caregivers naturally admit or express outwardly what they feel inwardly, the message is that their own inner states of emotive truth are not safe to either feel or admit or express. And since EBE maintains who we really are is always a function of what we feel far more primarily than what we know or how we act, children feel the pain of abandonment, betrayal, and rejection at the level of invisible vibratory bondedness with caregivers. They instead learn to disown this pain and learn to become other than their natural selves, i.e., by strategically maximizing behaviors that got them love and approval from caregivers, and minimizing behaviors that got them disapproval or punishment.

This results in a very unnatural and strategically-created form of inauthentic selfhood that for most of us persists throughout the rest of life, undermining any healthy or authentic basis for relating to anything life has to offer. This then is the true cause of most of the suffering at the level of our human arena in earth, inexorably flowing from the fact that the Strategic Self is itself the agent of life experience and its reflective analysis and examination, filtering and distorting life and its analysis in the direction of its own intrinsic in authenticity and suffering, and thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of suffering or of creating paradigms that cannot heal its source.

The way the Strategic Self does relationship revolves around three main modalities we all have thus been taught to create by our dysfunctional families and cultures: shrink-to-fit, expand-to-dominate, or serve-to-receive. As said, we are almost completely unaware to how these three modes create, maintain, and extend inauthenticity in our lives. Their presence comprises our own contribution as to why we are so chronically victimized, malnourished, unsuccessful, and/or unfulfilled in life.

They are even present when we seem to be happy or connected, again preventing us from realizing that which makes us happy could not possibly be healthy if what is made happy is the Strategic Self and not the authentic self! Again, that our Strategic Selves are so universally accepted as normal, both they and their legacy of preventing true heart connection with each other has become invisible. This invisibility blinds us to the truth that seeking unexamined states of happiness will always be medicative compensations for unconscious emotional self- unworthiness, which will exist by default unless one maintains one had a perfect childhood with perfectly emotionally mature parents.

How do you know when you are operating as your Strategic Self? To the degree you are consciously unaware you are being your Strategic Self. Which means, who you think you are right now. Who you really are is waiting for you to wake up to this fact, so it can finally emerge and put you on a further path of discovering who you really, really are as your soul-field dynamics and the other spiritual dimensions that comprise your being.

But all of this does not make the Strategic Self "bad." Its core motives revolve around providing our hidden subpersonas with sufficient love, safety and security in the form of our addictions and medications, to make up for how our natural selfhood was not provided with the kind of emotional nourishment it needed. As such, it is to be honored and respected for its role at the same time we must be relentless in our effort to dislodge it from its role as boss of our being and instead establish a newly-created authentic selfhood in its place and assigning it to an advisory role only, and no longer the reigning monarch.

So if the ability to feel caregivers feel us occurred consistently and without fail, which it never does fully, the child would have the experience they are known not by what they know, or what they do, but by who they are. To be able to impart this fundamental dynamic and read out that truth in their children, parents themselves must first not only be aware that this is the true nature of child-rearing, they themselves must be authentically tuned into their own true natures as being defined by who they really are and not by what they do or how they act. How many parents embody that?

This then is the long-lost-to-consciousness psycho-dynamical "fall from grace" that we then inappropriately projected into our religious paradigms in antiquity.

We only felt "banished" from our childhood "Eden" when it experientially became clear as open-hearted and non-defensed non-strategic children that our energetic anticipation and hopefulness of being met and connected up vibrationally at the level of the heart with our first gods, our primary caregivers, was not going to occur. We then felt abandoned and betrayed, banished from our "homeland" of heart-based invisible vibratory linkage with life at this level of density. The inability to feel caregivers feel us at the level of dynamic energetic heart-linkage in the early stages of human life thus corresponds to the feeling of being "cast out" by some parental God.

Theohumanity is the greater spiritual paradigm out of which EBE precipitates. It maintains Maker never banished us for being disobediently "bad." Only a god projected out of our own neuroses and control mechanisms would do such a thing. The Living Maker-Mystery of Being out of Which everything arises in every moment is Love and nothing else.

Inwardly, the net effect of this inability to feel caregivers feel us not only creates the Strategic Self to compensate for its lack, it also creates deep-seated unmet-unwanted-unworthy feelings of self-shame. It was then this psychodynamically-created self unworthiness and shame that was projected out into the Eden myth as there was something intrinsically wrong about us in our humanness in the form of a mythical "original sin." Once the fantasy of original sin that caused us to be displeasing to God was invented, it then required the need for some kind of unworthiness-based life-long ritualized atonement for our "tainted" human nature.

The tragic legacy of this myth lies in terms of how much unwarranted religious, philosophical, and paradigmatic negative judgment and abuse has been perpetrated upon our basic sacred human nature as the self. The effects of this abuse the otherwise pristine and innocent heart of humankind in both gross and subtle expression is almost too staggering to describe. In the main, it split humanity into two philosophical camps that for hundreds of years have been metaphysically at odds: secular humanism and mystical-based religion or spirituality. This paradigmatic rift between what we conceive as our human and spiritual natures has always been an artifact created by the world-views of our strategic selves, which in truth have always been one true nature of divine humanity.

But the Strategic Self cannot even be displaced by what for millennia we have been calling enlightenment, wherein all of our personal reality lenses or filters by which we come to identify ourselves as individual beings are obliterated. Even in that rarefied consciousness environment, without a prior and effective specific means to heal the basis of the Strategic Self, it will be the Strategic Self who becomes enlightened, not the natural authentic being who remains untouched beneath all of that perceptible change.

In the same light, the Strategic Self is not deconstructed and our "true" natures revealed by meditatively wiping out the actual mechanisms of self-perception or unifying consciousness into Universal Love. Despite how deeply saints and sages and their followers for millennia have believed otherwise, the only way to fully reveal our true being is to first heal away the Strategic Self, and then go about our spiritual efforts to expand consciousness. Only then will the deepest truths about our nature be revealed to us. Psychoemotional, personhood-based self-authentication simply cannot be attained through spiritual practice. The apparent deepening authenticity that seems to occur is just a re- working of our inauthentic Strategic Selfhood, and not its deconstruction.

In other words, almost all of our challenges, heartbreaks, and frustration within the entire scope of our species are not because we are intrinsically sinful or bad; not because we believe in the illusion of individual selfhood; not because we have inappropriate belief systems; not because we don't know what God wants for us or how to serve it; not because we are not spiritual or "serving others" needs more than our own; not because we don't meditate or contemplate enough; not because we're not trying hard enough in any way; and certainly not because we lack proper levels of brain chemicals.

It's because we are all going through life with, and as, an inauthentic agency of life experience. The more the inauthentic the selfhood-vehicle through which we filter the experience of life, the less the deepest meaningful experience of life is possible. The more authentic the selfhood-vehicle through which we filter the experience of life, the deeper our encounter of love, fulfillment, and meaning.

It's that simple. No matter how much we try to escape, mentally cover over, behaviorally shift, or spiritually transcend the shadow cast by our inauthentic form of selfhood, it will follow us, cast a pall, and severely limit all attempts at raising our consciousness to the degree it remains unprocessed and undigested in our emotional body. EBE maintains the persistent presence of this false form of self is the smoking gun cause of why most of us lead lives of half-measure and hit-or-miss fulfillments in all arenas of life. In futility we seek real, authentic fulfillments and meanings in life, all the while doing life with an inauthentic and false version of the self as the experiencer of life. This means everyone needs an emotionally healing way to deconstruct their Strategic Selves.

If we're truly interested in authentic self-realization, we must both proactively seek out repositories of our unconscious emotive congestion of self-unworthiness beneath our strategic selves, and then link that inner work to change in our outer worlds. In this sense, EBE is not a passive, reflection-clarification perspectivization therapeutic model that waits for clients to simply bring triggering life crises and situations to be analyzed for their roots in unconscious conflict. It seeks to proactively seek out those unconscious congestions, not as an invasive artificial format that forces a client to yield to unmanageable emotions, but as a lovingly productive invitation that gives permission for our unconscious pain to open out to be embraced deeply and healingly.

It's time for us to realize how the historical lack of appreciating the intrinsic and fundamental role that our emotional bodies have in our lives has left us so confused about the true nature of our human condition and the manner in which our lives are lived. Even psychology, itself a study of the human condition only a little over a hundred years old, is generally ill-equipped by most of its paradigms to understand or work with the emotional body, which is why its results are often so incomplete and unpredictable. EBE offers the first comprehensive architectural map of the emotional body and the criteria for attaining lasting states of emotional maturity.

As such, the capacity to actually embody the psychoemotionally healing paradigm offered by EBE hinges on one critical ability: that we must be able to proactively access, explore, and heal the unconscious emotive landscape lying beneath the conscious felt-reality of our inauthentic, false selves that keep them undigested. Without that access, we will never discover the nature of our unconscious motivations based in our shame and unworthiness that drive the mechanism of our false Strategic Selves.

At present, at the level of practical therapy, psychology's diagnosis of the cause and treatment of our nonfunctional, self-stagnative, or self-destructive patterns has currently become a working, seat-of-the-pants hodgepodge or synthesis of many traditional views, notably those of Freud, Jung, Adler, Ellis, Perls, Wolberg, Erhard, Maslow, Brandon, Bradshaw, and Hendrix. Each of their perspectives slice the pie of human personality in different cuts using different-shaped knives of understandings, creating differing diagnoses of the definition, cause and treatment of psychopathology. EBE slices the pie with its own twelve-bladed knife, bringing together certain philosophical, spiritual, and psychological notions and applying them in a new way.

One of those premises is that virtually all other therapeutic modalities seek to access and treat our emotional congestions only, and not the parts of us who actually possess those emotional congestions. This distinction goes to the very heart of what psychotherapy premises and process, and leads to a fundamental shift of what it means to actually heal, and not just treat. In other words, other psychotherapeutic models seek to help clients create access to their emotive conflicts via free association, hypnosis, body-center triggering, memory refreshment, belief system clarification, behavioral modification and so on. The client is then able to create new conscious relationship to the ever-clarifying emotional conflict puzzle so change can occur.

But EBE maintains only when the conscious personality of the client creates relationship with the subpersona who possesses the actual content of our emotional distress, and not just the distress itself, can the subpersona then create healing relationship with its conflict, as it then is finally able to disidentify from being the conflict-experience to then the having of the conflict-experience, finally taking the original conflict to a new destination. Experiencing that emotive reality with a therapist who the client can feel clearly that they feel them, thus allows the subpersona to bring the conflict to a new outcome.

Then the reality of that emotional texture is fully honored, the very thing that did not occur in childhood because parents were not emotionally equipped to be fully and authentically present for children's emotional needs to be known, which caused the fixation to happen in the first place. In that moment of release and validation, a healthy ego-boundary finally forms, replacing the ego-defense that existed prior to the release. Only then can the self-stagnative or self-destructive behaviors formerly constructed upon the fear-based ego-defense finally dissipate, as the new foundation of a healthy ego-boundary allows new behaviors of a new house of self to be constructed upon it.

This is how we change our lives from inside-out in the actual healing of emotionally congestive fixations in our emotional bodies. EBE maintains only through cultivation of long-term relationship with the unconscious subpersonas who possess the congestion at cause for our problematic outer self-stagnative or self-destructive life patterns will those patterns be fully outworked.

In that way, EBE says that true self-esteem has nothing to do with feeling good about ourselves, but in the feeling real as ourselves. When our subspersonas are differentiated out of the blur of our Strategic Selfhood sufficiently and with whom we then create loving long-term relationship, they are then able to feel us feeling them. As that develops, the true self-love of healthy egoism, referred to in Theohumanity as the state of Personhood, is generated.

So without access to our inner subpersona family covered over by the presence of our strategic forms of selfhood, elucidation of the intricate nature of their issues, and emotional resolution of their cause, our conscious selves will never fully recover from the self-unworthiness congestions imparted to us within our families-of-origin. In those terms, EBE is as much a framework for other kinds of therapy as it is a stand-alone process, compatible with a host of other perspectives and techniques. By offering a new and unique access to both the shape and the content of our unconscious distress, it provides the critical structural centerpiece to ensure no stone within our unconscious emotional congestive landscape is left unturned.

In that sense, EBE helps us actually create the core self worthiness of emotional maturity by slowly deconstructing the distorting reality-filters imparted by our strategic selves experience of life. And being emotionally mature is not about then becoming flawless or perfect. It is about being strong enough to be so porous and accepting all of our imperfections we are no longer afraid or ashamed to share our naked core authentic self with the world, our inner realities always made luminously transparent to others.

So if our strategic selves are artifacts acquired through our defensive-based reactions to an inability to feel our caregivers feel us, then the authentic versions of self covered over by their effects but still alive beneath all that inauthenticity can be redeemed. This occurs by creating a dynamic wherein they, comprised of our inner family or tribe of subpersonas accessible and embody-able by EBE, finally encounter someone they can feel feels them. Then they emerge like the phoenix from the ashes of the deconstruction of the Strategic Self and emerge into our hearts and lives with a fresh take on human reality.

In the childhood phases of our human family development, the outer tribe or collective was the cultural and overall paradigmatic context within which the needs of the individual were subsumed. In the teenage phase, which started with the Renaissance and continues on today, the needs of the individual as an individual without the aegis of the tribe or collective began to clamor for their independence from their authority. But to fully attain the adulthood of our human family development, we must finally relegate the old paradigm of the authority of the group or collective into a younger bygone era of development that is no longer applicable.

In its place must come the ability to work with the inner tribe or collective, the subpersonas comprising the architecture of our emotional bodies. Only when they are inhabited and outworked of their conflicts will we ever be able to then create the only mature forms of outer tribe or collective there could ever be: those comprised solely of individuals who have learned to attain emotional maturity, and with it, the ability to finally generate healthy relationships with others based on universally criteriorized psychodynamically healthy motives of interaction.

This movement from forever trying to heal the self via outer collective or group contexts, which can never be attained, also means true emotional maturity cannot be attained by seeking to heal ourselves primarily through our relationships, especially our intimate ones. Intimate relationship is forever downstream of our individual immaturities, and thus only displays outwardly the immature manners in which we seek to have the unmet needs of childhood codependently met by our adult partners. Trying to heal the self in an outside-to-in or other-to-self fashion through our intimate partnerships is always doomed to failure, not only because it blindly legitimizes a virulent codependence in the name of growth, but more primarily because it reverses the true inside-to-out, self-to-other direction of true healing.

In the saga of our human experience, the Strategic Self has thus been the author of countless beautiful works of art, amazing feats of athletic accomplishment, deep philosophical insights into the meaning of meaning, and incredible scientific and technical attainments of civilization. But imagine how all of our human potential for wisdom and love would be increased if our goals were not just outer compensations to give ourselves inner value, but instead ways to naturally express an inner value already attained.

All of our confusion on how to be spiritual beings in human expression thus lies in continuing to try to pull the sword from the stone, thinking we must free our spirits from being trapped in the earth as imperfect selves. The secret is to stop resisting being inhabitants of earth by pushing our Excalibur of divine spark further into the stone of earth and self. As we do, we will find ourselves being pulled by our divine spark "down" to the core of our being, and discover surrender to the down-pull was really a rising into the fullness of life. Our true natures have remained buried beneath our fear until we discover that it is not might that is needed to free them, but the power of an innocent heart to follow it as it leads us to our destiny.

When we do, we realize it has only been ourselves, our own bright valor pierces and wounds, that have remained locked in fear. And as our own new young inner monarch draws its divine right of rulership from its home in the earth, we finally encounter a Kingdom where magic and man commingle, the fire of the dragon and the breath of God are made One, our crosses of burden become wings of freedom, our crowns of thorns become bejeweled tiaras, and a newly attained peace of heart reigns as the living Maker-expression of our divine humanity in earth.