CREATING POSSIBILITIES K. Bradford Brown

A SHIFT OF PERSPECTIVE W. Roy Whitten

Extract from a workshop led by
K. Bradford Brown at Sequoia Seminar, CA, 2000

“We all want to connect, and have our lives filled with who we really are. Filled with spirit, filled with vitality. Filled with reality, attuned with reality, as life really is. The More To Life program offers some practical things we can do: techniques for noticing, a method for getting to the truth about what holds us in chains at one level and what is really real, and how we can take our stand on our own reality as individuals. We need to get through our hubris and take a stand on what our life is about. I need to stand on being who I am and on that part of my ‘I’ that isn’t identified with having to be ‘good’ or having to be ‘successful’, that can stand as a whole human being who knows, and is capable of living and of love, of loving respect for other human beings as well as oneself.

When we take a stand on who we really are, something unique starts to happen to our creativity. I start to act out of who I really am, rather than who I am afraid of being or becoming. I am really sure about this human being that I am, and whom life has been calling forth since the day I first drew breath. In that sense life is creating us every day, and you are creating yourself as a result of it, as soon as you start to connect with reality just the way it is given to you.

Soon you start to want to create things for others and find ways of contributing to the world. Many of you have taken the opportunity in your creative process to contribute something with who you are. You may have created a piece of art, or a center for battered women, or you have been tutoring children in schools, or serving on the school board, or serving as a politician, or a parent: this happens naturally when we are living out our for-ness for the world we live in, and have all of our synapses working, so we can see the real possibilities of what is out there.

When we are stuck in the way we often see things we often don’t think of doing more than surviving, or getting by, or doing our duty. Or we go after something that will make us feel better, anything that would sell itself to us, so that we’d feel better for a while. We don’t recognize that life itself is for us: we can’t see it, we don’t know it. We’re so busy surviving it, so busy getting through it, so busy fighting it, fighting the battles we fight just to keep our heads above water, that what life itself is offering is not perceived and so it is not available.

What happens when you break through is like an amazing new world. Amazing! It is just like taking the wraps off who you are and what you can be, and how you can contribute, and what the possibilities of life are for the whole world, not just yourself. And there’s something about life that lines up with us and enhances us when we do this, so what I come out with is often far bigger than I ever imagined when I started out taking my stand on what I was picturing I would create.

You have this breakthrough, and suddenly you see what creative possibilities really are. Suddenly you look around and it’s a different world. It’s a different place. You’re in the hands of life itself, and you see what is being displayed in front of you, and it is so powerful, so magnificent, that you bring yourself to that all of a sudden: it is just like magic, suddenly you look up and there are ideas and thoughts and possibilities just all around you.”

K. Bradford Brown


From a paper by Roy Whitten for the California Institute of Integral Studies

"Habitual thought patterns are very powerful, instantaneous and imposed with blinding speed. Something happens, and almost without thinking about it we 'know' what it means, what 'they' are up to, what we 'must' do to deal with it. We grow up with constant reinforcement for this way of being and we're so functional in it, we don’t even know it’s happening. We call it being ‘normal.'

When an entire culture acts like this, the result is what we get to live with: unnoticed assumptions, conflict, misuse of resources, prejudices, justified cruelty, and other separating behavior no human being would choose if she or he were really awake and aware. This happens to you and me, over and over again, day after day. The problem is that knowing about it doesn’t keep it from happening.

Three days ago, my daughter called to say that as she was leaving the school parking lot, her car was hit from behind by another student's car. My daughter is 16, a new driver, and was understandably shaken. When I discovered she had only managed to obtain this student’s first name and phone number I was immediately and irrationally incensed. It was when she said, ‘Don’t lecture me, Dad,’ that I think I really lost it. I heard myself say things that are so comically stereotypical that, for a moment, I was outside myself, listening to some stranger being a complete idiot with his daughter. I was convinced of the following: that my daughter knew better, had been lazy, was being completely irresponsible, that the other student would deny what had happened, that her parents would disclaim all responsibility, and that I would be stuck with a bill for several hundred dollars.

I was completely uninterested in connecting with the truth of what had really happened. This was that my 16 year-old daughter was upset, and was calling me up specially to tell me about what had happened. That the other student had tried to argue her out of doing anything, but that she managed to get a name and a phone number as well. That my daughter knew the passenger in the other car, and had decided against starting a fight in a busy parking lot. For my part I was stuck in a separate universe of my own making, and enraged entirely by my own imagination.

Fortunately, the experience of being disabused of the power of our illusory world, as I was when I finally woke up from my nightmare, is also tangible and undeniable. We sometimes get glimpses of this kind of awakening when we least expect it. It sometimes corresponds with apparently insignificant events. But they come at critical moments in our personal lives, and also at key times in the life of the social and political communities of which we are part. The word 'amazing' is not an exaggeration of the sense of peace, the fullness, the strength, the objectivity, the release from stress and worry, and the new sense of awareness that is instantly ours, when we know how to welcome it."

W. Roy Whitten