Creation - Maintenance - Destruction

CREATION - MAINTENANCE - DESTRUCTION

Before I had personal experience with the following knowledge, it was first introduced to me by my teacher Thom Knoles, who learned it from his teacher Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who learned it from his teacher Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, and so on back thousands of years… Jai Guru Deva. 

Three of the preeminent forces operating in the universe are Creation, Maintenance and Destruction. 

CREATION: For the purpose of bringing forth something new and evolutionary into existence via innovation, improvisation, or fashioning previous creations into a never-before-realized combination.

MAINTENANCE: For the purpose of maintaining creations, as long as they remain relevant to evolution.

DESTRUCTION: For the purpose of destroying previous creations that are no longer relevant to evolution. The cycle can then continue and new relevant creations can occur. 

The Universe does nothing but change: these three forces keep that imperative in motion.

We have seen these forces at play in our own lives millions of times: in our homes, play, work, creativity, relationships, health, possessions, thoughts, beliefs, you name it. The following are some examples:

• A fruit is created, matures, and ripens: its status is then maintained for as long as it is useful (relevant); maybe until it is eaten by an animal, insect or human. Once it ceases to remain relevant for consumption, it drops from the tree and is destroyed by decomposition. It then reintegrates whence it came, back into the earth for the purpose of supporting new creation.

• You start a new job; it’s exciting and challenging at first: it remains that way for a period of time, yet once you settle in, maybe it begins to feel monotonous. At that point, either you take the initiative to change your perspective, shake things up, or you maintain the status quo. If you choose to maintain the status quo, you will then either fall out of love with the job and quit, your performance will wane and you’ll be fired, your position will go away, or the company will go under, etc. Ultimately, if your maintenance of the status quo becomes overzealous, one way or another, the current irrelevant status of your job will be destroyed.

• You engage in a new intimate relationship; everything is fresh and mysterious, and a massive amount of leaping into the unknown, discovery, learning and excitement is occurring. Then, naturally, over time, the newness and the mystery subside: you then either take the initiative to shift perspective, shake things up and reintroduce novelty, or you maintain the status quo. If you choose to maintain the status quo, you may become bored or resentful: then you or your partner may become unfaithful or you’ll stop spending time together, or you’ll start fighting about everything. One way or the other, the status quo of the relationship will be destroyed. This may mean that the relationship itself will be destroyed because its relevancy or usefulness is over for both of you. Or, merely the current status of the relationship will be destroyed. This may involve some pain, but ultimately will provide the opportunity for both parties to heed the call of change, shift perspectives, reengage in a new way, and recreate the way they relate: reigniting relevancy.

• Your body is fit and healthy due to its youth, despite the fact that you don’t feed it well and don’t exercise. Time passes and you begin to get some small nudges that your body is not as vital as it once was, yet you pay no mind and continue to neglect to nourish your body with healthy food and exercise. Seemingly out of nowhere, a major health scare arrives that threatens your life. Option A: you heed the call and completely change your lifestyle, reinstating your body’s vitality and deepening your reverence for earthly life. Option B: you do what you need to do to “fix” your illness in the short term but then quickly return to the status quo of neglecting your health. Sooner or later, bodily deterioration and possibly bodily death arrive.

One of the major themes here is that change is always imminent, whether we like it or not. We can either:

• Try our best to stop change, the imperative of the entire Universe, and eventually be dragged kicking and screaming by destruction into change, or…

• Become highly aware of the nudges we are receiving as to the waning relevancy of a particular aspect of our life, then choose to embody the destruction operator, destroy what has become irrelevant and LEAP into the unknown—pure creation.

Like a canned good, every person, place, thing, experience, thought, belief or emotion has an expiration date: a window of relevancy. Yet we often tend to either not look at all or pretend as though we did not see the expiration date and then blame the expired phenomenon for following the imperative of the Universe—CHANGE. It’s important to note that expiration is not the end; it’s merely a change of status, which is ultimately a new beginning. The dictionary definition of expiration is “The ending of the fixed period for which a contract is valid:” a contract with evolutionary relevance. 

Now, each one of these roles—Creation, Maintenance and Destruction—is equally important in our lives. Optimally, we want all three in play, in the above order, in a circular fashion. Yet many of us have had periods where the above order became askew, such as Maintenance in the primary position, destruction in the secondary, and creation in the tertiary: creating a life experience where fear of the unknown is the driving force, leading to a painful oscillation between monotony and destruction. 

Maybe we’ve had periods or have witnessed the experiences of others in which Maintenance has been relegated to the tertiary position, placing Destruction in the secondary. Thus, this creates a volatile experience of major creative highs immediately followed by crushing destructive lows, due to there being no maintenance of what is working, what is relevant, and therefore no sustainability. 

Maybe we’ve experienced or witnessed Destruction being in the primary position with constant rejection of Creation and Maintenance. This can play out as someone constantly sabotaging themselves and/or others, or involved in a life of crime, violence, drugs, sometimes leading to life in jail, bodily death inflicted by another or by oneself.

These are not punishing, but benevolent cause-and-effect forces in the Universe, tirelessly doing their work to keep the entire Universe, which of course includes YOU, moving in the direction of evolutionary change.

Let’s have reverence for, become intimate with, foster an alliance with and be available to embody these forces. Let’s heed their call: “NIVAR TATVAM” = Transcend where you are. 

All of my love, Wade Robson.

POVERTY CONSCIOUSNESS

POVERTY CONSCIOUSNESS: The mistaken thought or belief that there is not enough.

Not enough time, space, creativity, work, money, love, you name it.

This would be an understandable evaluation if we humans were truly nothing but temporal flesh and blood and that flesh and blood was the sole author of our life.

Yet, maybe you have felt before, if even for a moment, that there is something bigger going on in this Universe: some sort of animating force. That YOU are something bigger than your flesh and blood. Maybe when you were in the midst of creating something or doing anything that you deeply love, and you felt like something was creating or moving THROUGH you, if even for a moment.

Who you truly are precedes, permeates and prevails your flesh and blood. Who you truly are is the source from which you came, and that source is Pure Consciousness.

Your source is also the source of EVERYTHING in existence, which of course includes everything you’ve ever wanted.

Your source is infinite and inexhaustible, and your source is not separate from you; therefore, who YOU truly are is infinite and inexhaustible.

The time has come to transcend Poverty Consciousness and elevate to the ultimate truth of ABUNDANCE CONSCIOUSNESS.

Love, Wade.

ANGER

I find myself at the sink, rapidly cleaning dishes: I don’t remember deciding to clean dishes. My body is riddled with heat, electricity, and tightness. What’s going on? Oh right, I’m angry…

For as long as I can remember, I’ve run from feeling and expressing anger. I remember my Mother and Sister, from time to time, becoming outwardly, passionately angry; I hated it. At some point, I decided that I wasn’t going to do that, ever. I was always going to be the calm, level-headed one. When everyone else was freaking out, I would be the eye of the storm.

My childhood idol/abuser would also get angry every now and then, but it was a very different kind of expressed anger; it was quiet, internal, cold, calculated, vengeful, and saturated in superiority. Beginning as a child, I think I tried to adopt his brand of anger. As with everything he did, I thought it was cool, yet I was terrified to ever be on the receiving end of it. In hindsight, this fear probably added to my already powerful compulsion to lie for and defend him for so many years. 

As a teenager and young adult, I took pride in people commenting on how calm I was, how I never seemed to get angry or stressed. My anger-free strategy was to avoid conflict at all costs, either by people-pleasing, walking away, being the boss and having someone else deal with it, or just cutting someone out of my life cold turkey: a tactic I also learned from my abuser. Along with anger, I buried most of my emotions, or, as I thought, “channeled” into my work. For a while, it seemed my plan was working.

One night, early on in my relationship with my now wife, Amanda, she became very upset because she thought that I was attracted to another woman at a restaurant event we were attending. I calmly tried to explain to her that she was absolutely mistaken. She wasn’t buying it. The truth was, she was mistaken, as I was utterly in love with and only had eyes for her. As she continued to refute my “calm” defense, finally something snapped inside of me: I threw down my keys in blistering anger and screamed at her injustice. Amanda’s immediate response was to scream back, “Yeah! Come on! Now we’re getting somewhere!” Whoa, ha, not the reaction I expected. She was excited to finally see me express some anger. This was only a momentary release, though; I rapidly bottled all of that back up. 

Several years later, our son was born; I had two nervous breakdowns over the course of a year; I disclosed the sexual abuse I experienced as a child and began my healing journey. As it turned out, keeping my anger submerged was no longer going to be possible. As 20-plus years of suppressed emotions began to be expelled from my mind and body, anger started to rise up with a vengeance and speed beyond my capability to suppress it. For the first time in my life, I began to argue and raise my voice, one time even punching a hole in our wall. In therapy, meditation and journaling, I began to face and start processing my anger towards my Abuser, my Mother, as well as the many people around my abuser who turned a blind eye to his activities. This particular phase of release was both terrifying and liberating.

I then began to become aware that often when I would become angry, what was actually happening was that my ego was trying to protect me from what was really going on underneath: namely, embarrassment, guilt or shame. Another portal to another layer of possible healing had been revealed.

My Son is one of my greatest sources of joy, inspiration, meaning and purpose in life, as well as unintentionally triggering my anger like no other. I’d love to plead my case here as to why I’m justified in my reactions to some of his behaviors, but the hard truth is sometimes he merely doesn’t want to do what I want him to do, or he ignores me, or he makes us late, or he questions my authority, or will simply not be controlled. Often when I’m outside of the triggering moment, I’m able to appreciate his individuality, but frequently, in the midst of it, it all makes me quite angry. Over time, I’ve learned that the source of my anger is not actually my Son; it’s old pain deep inside of me that is being activated; yet in the moment, that’s often hard to remember. One of my early insights to this was from an incredible book, which I recommend for any parent, entitled “Parenting from the inside out.” 

When this anger begins to swell up in me, I occasionally still try to suppress it: remaining calm on the outside and pleasantly asking over and over again for my instructions to be followed. Once upon a time, I could continue to suppress that anger indefinitely, but now I can only hold it down for so long. At some point, the top blows off, the valve releases and from the outside perspective, I go from seemingly complete calm to anger in a split second. My posture becomes erect, my voice booming, my eyes laser-focused, and my words cutting. 

Thankfully, the majority of my anger goes unexpressed to my Son: rather, I try to remove myself from the interaction, get some space and privately lean into the anger. I try to become intimate with it psychologically, but most importantly, physiologically: to observe it, track it and describe it to myself. I find that often by this act alone, the anger begins to dissipate. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing work has been instrumental for me in this process. Yet sometimes the intensity of the anger also requires that I expel it some other way, such as exercise, journaling, venting to a friend, meditation, or as I began this essay, at the sink, rapidly cleaning dishes. 

Finding myself at the sink, without remembering having consciously chosen it, has, I believe, something to do with my ego, when stressed or angry due to a futile attempt at control, looking for something that “we” CAN control. “We can take these dirty dishes, and we can make them clean. It’s simple, they don’t talk back, manipulate or abuse: they do what we want them to,” says the ego. This human thing can be so messy: I guess sometimes I just want to clean it up, put it away and close the cabinet doors.

As children, we don’t have a lot of control of our external lives, and in my case, as in many others, the child abuse and forced silence I experienced were a heightened experience of loss of control and disempowerment. Among other tactics, my ego sometimes tries to use anger to regain a false sense of control and power. This is, of course, not real power, not sustainable and not a tactic I endorse, as in these instances, the ego and anger are in control.

The good news is, as I keep leaning in, observing, questioning, redirecting and, most impactfully, meditating, anger continues to lose its grip on my mind and body. I no longer believe anger is wrong or a mistake; it is a part of the human experience and therefore has its relevance. I don’t want to suppress it anymore, but I also don’t want to project it out onto anybody else. Therefore, my constant practice remains leaning into it and engaging in healthy, non-violent ways to exercise it and channel it.

My experience with anger so far has been yet another lesson in regard to our infinite capability as humans to consciously or unconsciously create our internal experience, and ultimately our external experience. Therefore, since our experience of the external world is dependent upon our perspective on it, from the inside is how we change it. 

Love, Wade.