The “Mother of All Teachable Moments”

The Gates-Crowley-Obama incident of last week offers a pivotal insight for the transformation of mankind that goes far beyond what President Obama envisions with what he calls a “teachable moment.”

This could be the “Mother of All Teachable Moments.”

But only if we look deeper than the “racial stuff” to see what really happened.

What you’re about to read isn’t for everyone.  Most people aren’t ready for it.

But many others want to awaken.

And so I’m compelled to share what I know to be “a truth.”  The truth beyond the facts.

A Whole ‘Nother Level

This is not about what the arrest of Prof. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates shows us about race relations, racial profiling, police behavior, racial divide, politics, the media, or or anything similar.  Not directly, anyway.

It’s also not a he-said, she-said analysis of events.

It’s not a list of demands or proposals.

I’m taking this to a whole ‘nother level.  It’s not cute, or clever.  And it’s not trying to prove anything to anybody.

It is some knowledge that could change your life.  I can tell you straight up that it’s definitely changed mine.

Don’t Worry, Everyone Missed This

Out of hundreds of reports, interviews, articles, editorials, statements, and reactions as well as thousands of hours of television coverage about the incident, I saw not one that grasped the pivotal, evolutionary nature of the opportunity it presents.

A lot of talk, but no awareness.

This is not to criticize those who tried earnestly to describe, explain, express, share, admonish, or propose.

It’s only to suggest that if you didn’t catch it, don’t worry.  Neither did all of experts, pundits, officials, journalists, leaders, representatives, and others.

The Pain-Body

This incident is such a perfect illustration of the one thing that has had the most destructive, toxic impact in our society — here in America and around the world — and that yet is the easiest to fix.

The illustration is so perfect, that years from now the incident will seem to have been staged — by Gates, Sgt. James Crowley, and President Barack Obama.

That “one thing” is called the “pain-body.”

If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry.  I’m about to break it down for y’all and put all of this into context.

The term “pain-body” is relatively new; it was coined by Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual philosopher and best-selling author.  One of his books is called A New Earth and it is so astonishingly simple that it was the subject of a live webcast on The Oprah Winfrey Show that has been watched and downloaded by upwards of 40 million people.

So, Tolle’s teachings are not fringe ideas.

The pain-body is an energy field that is trapped inside all human beings as the result of the long term accumulation of unresolved negative emotions.

“Any negative emotion that is not fully faced and seen for what it is in the moment it arises does not completely dissolve,” Tolle explains.  “It leaves behind a remnant of pain.”

The pain-body lives as energy in the cells of your body.  It can be dormant or active.  When it is activated, the energy it releases is in the form of a surge of negative emotions.  These negative emotions create unexamined and uncontrolled negative thinking that takes over your mind.  The pain-body then feeds off of these negative thoughts to sustain itself, thus completing the vicious cycle.

“At that point,” says Tolle, “the addiction to unhappiness has set in.”  The victim’s unhappiness is so profound that he or she begins to identify with it.

After a while, the pain-body returns to its dormant state, only to surface again and again, needing only the slightest provocation.

The pain-body, Tolle explains, “has its own primitive intelligence, not unlike a cunning animal, and its intelligence is directed primarily toward survival.”

The way to end this vicious cycle is simply to be aware of the pain-body.  That’s all.

Let me briefly go a bit further into terminology, before getting back to the Gates-Crowley-Obama incident.  As you’ll see, the pain-body explains everything that happened, and much more.

As I said, this is not for everyone, but if you’re ready then please come along with me on this.

Negative Emotions

Emotion is the body’s response to your thoughts, or to your mind’s interpretation of a situation.

Negative emotions are any emotions that are toxic, destabilizing, and disruptive to the smooth, natural working of your body.  These might include fear, anxiety, hostility, dejection, resentment, regret, anger, grief, hatred, dislike, jealousy, and envy.

“Even mainstream medicine, although it knows very little about how the ego operates yet,” Tolle observes, “is beginning to recognize the connection between negative emotional states and physical disease.”

Ego

We humans have an unconscious urge to make “things” part of our identity.  We try to “find ourselves” in things.  When I identify with a thing, I make it the same as me.

“Things” include objects and content, as well as thoughts, mental positions, and emotions. What we identify with depends on our conditioning.  The extent of our identification with “things” determines how acutely we suffer when they are “taken away.”  Think of a child that identifies deeply with a toy.  Taking away the toy is like taking away the child’s sense of self.

Our ego is like that child.  It’s the part of us that identifies with “things.”

“You can value and care for things,” says Tolle, “but whenever you get attached to them you will know it’s the ego.”

Therefore no “thing” has ever had anything to do with who you really are.  The ego is the “voice in your head”, but it is not who you really are.  It cannot feel your “being.”

That’s why we never quite find ourselves in “things.” But the ego keeps on trying just the same, even though ego-identification causes attachment, obsession, preoccupation, addiction, and other dysfunction.

“This is why one of the ills of our times is object proliferation,” Tolle explains.  “When you can no longer feel the life that you are, you are likely to try to fill up your life with things.”

A bit more from Tolle:

The ego isn’t wrong; it’s just unconscious.  When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it.  Don’t take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile.  At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn’t personal.  It isn’t who you are.  If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that’s just more ego.

Being and Presence

To experience who you really are, that is to say your true “being,” you must go beyond the ego. Since the ego is strictly thought-based, the only way to go “beyond the ego” is to stop thinking.

Most people can’t do that, or not so easily.  Instead of using your mind, your mind uses you.  Most people think incessantly, compulsively, involuntarily.  But a growing number are beginning to realize that this leads to madness, pain, and suffering.  At this point, they decide it’s time to awaken.

There are many simple “techniques” to help you stop thinking. One of my favorites is to just simply be aware of my breathing.  Another way is to closely examine and appreciate something from nature, like a flower.  It takes practice, but you can do it!

When you stop thinking, you become “present.”  You are then able to observe thoughts and emotions.  This is where creativity, joy, peace, and love emerge from within.

When you are present, you are “in the now.”  You are able to feel the “aliveness” of your own being, and your connection to the “being-ness” and life that is present in all things.

Energy Field

Although formless and invisible, your being can also be sensed by others.  It has it’s own energy field that radiates with a vibrational frequency. It can’t be seen because the frequency is too high — higher than that of the matter that makes up physical objects. Thoughts and emotions are also made up of energy vibrating at certain frequencies.  Negative thoughts vibrate at a lower frequency than positive thoughts.  Negative and positive emotions do the same.

“The vibrational frequency of the pain-body resonates with that of negative thoughts, which is why only those thoughts can feed the pain-body,” Tolle writes.

Pain-Bodies Find Each Other

Your pain-body looks for my pain-body, and vice versa.  When they find each other, they do whatever it takes to provoke and create drama.  Then they feed off of the ensuing negative thoughts and emotions. They want to inflict and suffer more pain.

“It is hard to resist another person’s pain-body that is determined to draw you into a reaction,” Tolle explains.  “Instinctively it knows your weakest, most vulnerable points.”

Examples of how this works include road rage, spousal abuse, or “crimes of passion.”

People say, “I don’t know what got into me!”  It was the pain-body.

As Tolle points out, the image of Christ crucified, in agony, was meant to serve as the outward symbol of the inner pain-body that was known to exist in man even in medieval times.

Day-To-Day Problems

Some pain-bodies are so dense, and so heavy, that they are always or almost always active.  But the people who are the hosts of these, don’t even know it.

Tolle:

Unaware of the pain they carry inside, by their reaction, they project the pain into events and situations.  Due to complete lack of self-awareness, they cannot tell the difference between an event and their reaction to the event. To them, the unhappiness and even the pain itself is out there in the event or situation.

No matter where they go and no matter what they do, people with dense pain-bodies look to find fault, create enemies, attract hostility, feel bad, and make others feel bad.  Because the negative energy generated by their pain-bodies saturates anything they encounter, they always find exactly that.

Collective Pain-Bodies

Just as individuals can carry a pain-body, so too can entire groups of people.

“Tribes, nations, races, all have their own collective pain-body, some heavier than others,” says Tolle, “and most members of that tribe, nation, or race have a share in it to a greater or lesser degree.”

On a global level, he says, the pain and violence inflicted and suffered by all humans throughout the history of the world lives “in the collective psyche of humanity and is being added to on a daily basis, as you can verify when you watch the news tonight or look at the drama in people’s relationships.”

Collective pain-bodies behave in exactly the same way as individual ones.

So, an entire nation may seek to derive its identity from “things” or “places” or ideology, rather than from who its people really are.

An entire culture may carry the remnants of pain left over from generations of unresolved negative emotions.

An entire race may confuse its collective situation with its collective reaction to that situation, in which case the group’s collective unhappiness may become so profound that the entire race begins to identify with it, become addicted to it.

If this is beginning to strike a chord, it should.

By now I hope that you would not have to be a famous spiritual teacher to recognize that African Americans have a pronounced pain-body.

But there’s a twist.

The history of pain and suffering inflicted upon African Americans doesn’t only affect black people, but “has become part of the collective American pain-body,” Tolle says.

“It has always been the case that both victim and perpetrator suffer the consequences of any acts of violence, oppression, or brutality,” he continues.  “For what you do to others, you do to yourself.”

The good news is that, just as in individuals, all it takes to get rid of the collective pain-body is a collective awareness of it.  “When it is recognized,” says Tolle, “it can no longer pretend to be you and live and renew itself through you.”

The collective awareness, of course, begins at a personal level.

And, just as with individuals, groups with heavy collective pain-bodies are also more likely to awaken spiritually.  But they must first reach that point where their collective unhappiness is so profound that it is no longer bearable.

Are we there yet?

Back To The Incident

Now that we know about the pain-body, let’s take another look at what happened last week.

What was your immediate reaction to the news?  Mine was, time out, there’s more to the story.

On the one hand, Prof. Gates, who is a brilliant man, and who is as cheerful as one can seem on the surface, is also known to have an inflammatory side to him.

Is it because he’s a cranky old man?  Not at all.  It’s because he possesses a heavy pain-body.  We all do, but his pain-body may be especially dense, perhaps because it is associated specifically with the study of the painful history of African Americans and race relations in America.

It’s likely that his pain-body also has a heavy individual component.  Much of his sense of self may be derived from what some call the “race industry,” in which he has a vested interest, and from his attachment to the mental positions he’s formulated there. The long-term affect of identification with external “things” is the accumulation of pain.

So his pain-body contribution is likely collective as well as personal.

Add to that a certain degree of unconsciousness — lack of presence — that is to say, his inability to accept what “is” as hinted by the reports that described him as being irritable after a long flight from China.

On the other hand there was Sgt. Crowley.  His stellar background hit the news almost immediately, so it was easy to tell that he wasn’t just “some white cop,” so to speak.

In particular, one couldn’t help but notice that he was hand-picked by an African American police commissioner to teach a class — which he taught for five years — about how to avoid racial profiling, and that he gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to former Boston Celtics star Reggie Lewis after he collapsed in 1993 during a basketball practice at Brandeis University, where Crowley was a police officer at the time.

It’s not clear whether Crowley harbors any grief, regret, or guilt relative to having tried in vain to save Lewis — if he does, it would certainly be no surprise — or if he has other factors contributing to his personal pain-body.

Meanwhile, all law enforcement officials shoulder the burden of a collective pain-body that is the reservoir for their entire history suffering from trauma, loss, guilt, frustration, and resentment in the line of duty.  It’s known that cops frequently have heavy pain-bodies.

All to say that everyone has a pain-body, however heavy or light.

With clear understanding of the workings of the pain-body, it’s easy to see what happened.

Here are two pain-bodies that sought each other out, activated one another, took control of each man’s mind, then successfully created the drama they needed to thrive.

Was that racism?  Was it criminal?

Not at all.  Just two dysfunctional states of being, in a head-on collision. That happens every single day in every single city in every single country throughout the world.

But, because of our participation in the collective American pain-body, when it happens here between a white cop and a black man we automatically call it racial profiling.  We are addicted to calling it that, because doing so causes our collective pain-body to release more intense negative emotions, which in turn creates even more negative thoughts for our pain-bodies to feast upon.

In that sense, the real drama was about to begin.

President Obama

When President Obama stated publicly, without full knowledge of the facts, that the Cambridge Police “acted stupidly,” it was clear that his pain-body had also become activated.  It was evident even in his tone.

In an instant, his pain-body had succeeded in creating even more drama — not only for his personal pain-body to savor but also for the collective American pain-body to consume.  This was its goal.

Later, when President Obama’s pain-body had become partially dormant again, he seemed to recognize, at least partially, that he had had a pain-body attack.

That’s when he admitted, “I could have calibrated those words differently.”

But remember, during a pain-body attack, nothing is well-calibrated. Any pain-body reaction is automatically an overreaction.  The person is completely unconscious as the pain-body takes over, even if only for an instant.

President Obama demonstrated a remarkable understanding of this by sensing that Prof. Gates and Sgt. Crowley, both exceptional people, had had similar attacks:

I continue to believe, based on what I have heard, that there was an overreaction in pulling Professor Gates out of his home to the station. I also continue to believe, based on what I heard, that Professor Gates probably overreacted as well. My sense is you’ve got two good people in a circumstance in which neither of them were able to resolve the incident in the way that it should have been resolved and the way they would have liked it to be resolved.

He also seemed to acknowledge the existence of the collective pain-body and how it works:

… be mindful of the fact that because of our history, because of the difficulties of the past, you know, African Americans are sensitive to these issues. And even when you’ve got a police officer who has a fine track record on racial sensitivity, interactions between police officers and the African American community can sometimes be fraught with misunderstanding.

Shock

No one should be shocked by what happened.

We should be shocked by ourselves, that we were so unconscious for so long that we never knew about the pain-body until now.  All of us.

Demands

Do you realize now, that demands for apologies — no matter from wherever they originate — will not help dissipate our individual or collective pain-bodies, and so would be of little value?

Neither will demands for more sensitivity training, demands for closer examinations of the racial divide, demands for law enforcement reforms, demands to know exactly what happened, demands for people to realize that this can happen to anyone, demands for self-policing, demands that more people see or state the obvious, demands that black people get more respect, or demands for more demands to be heard.

Much of the reaction in the media and from politicians is along these lines.

Many people reached shocked, outraged conclusions like, “See, racism is still a problem in America!”  But this is inaccurate because it is a generalization. What is a fact, is that there are still instances of racism in America.

Creating generalizations out of situations makes them into problems, which only feeds individual and collective pain-bodies.

Even President Obama was wrong in that regard, when he said that the “media frenzy” in reaction to this incident was “indicative of the fact that race is still a troubling aspect of our society.”

He couldn’t have meant to say it that way, because “race” is not a “troubling aspect” in and of itself. What’s true is that issues relating to race — more accurately, issues relating to the history of race relations in this country — are made into a troubling aspect by our individual and collective pain-bodies.

In that sense he’s completely right about the massiveness of our collective pain-body and its insatiable hunger.  You can observe it too.  It seems we must have a race-related flare up at least once per week.  Why else do you think that is so?

Education

The only “teachable” moment here, the only educational opportunity, is to make people more aware of the pain-body, both individual and collective.

The reason we are “incapable of talking straight with one another about race,” as Glenn C. Loury writes eloquently in his New York Times editorial, is because of our lack of knowledge about the pain-body.  Yet, Loury’s declaration that the incident is “emblematic of precisely nothing at all” is, ironically, emblematic of this same lack of knowledge.

If, from now on, we look at race-related situations through our knowledge of the pain-body, we will soon realize that charges of racism feed the collective pain-body as much as racism itself.  So do any related denials.

We now can see why affirmative action policies and programs won’t necessarily work, if no one is aware of the underlying pain-bodies carried by all Americans.  Failure to recognize this is why affirmative action is so confusing and divisive.  What we need is “affirmative awareness” of the collective American pain-body.

We now can see why simply honoring more black people more intensely will not help.

When then-Senator Obama gave his “race speech” in Philadelphia last year, the sense of relief felt afterward by many people was actually due to the partial dissipation of the collective American pain-body.  This partial dissipation helped get him elected to the Presidency.

The partial dissipation was made possible because the speech brought awareness to our reactions to problems associated with race-relations, rather than just to the problems.  Thus, it created a slight amount of space that wedged its way in between the situation itself and our identification with it.  That’s precisely what is needed in dealing with a pain-body.

Although there are still instances of racism in this country, the good news is that the energy released by such dissipation goes straight into raising the frequency of individual and collective consciousness to a higher level.

The only thing that will make individual and collective pain-bodies go away is awareness of them.  Therefore, the best thing any of us can do is first of all realize that pain-bodies exist.  Then, begin educating others to this fact.

Can you get rid of someone else’s pain-body?

The simple answer is that you cannot. The accumulated unresolved negative emotion in others can only go away for them once they realize it exists.

In any case, while a person is in the grip of a pain-body attack, they become so unconscious that they can’t even understand what you’re talking about.

The only thing, the best thing, you can do is to look past their pain body and recognize their “real” selves, which is who they really are.

Meanwhile, if other people’s pain itself pains you, then you may want to observe yourself for awhile to see whether or not you have your own pain-body, and what triggers it.

In the end, all we can do is be conscious ourselves. We cannot be conscious for others, or “make” others conscious, although our own consciousness benefits the collective and helps everyone.

Racism?

Looking through the prism of the pain-body, it now becomes possible to see many things beyond this incident from a new perspective, particularly in regard to race relations in America.

Let’s look at racism itself.  Is it really what we think it is?

There is no doubt whatsoever about the existence of inequities, disparities, or disproportionate representation along racial lines in many areas of our society including (but not limited to) unemployment, drug arrests, police stops, incarceration rates, violent crime, incidences of HIV/AIDS, family dysfunction, poverty, health care, drug and alcohol abuse, educational progress, political representation, and career advancement.

But what if some or all of this is related to race only circumstantially?

What if what we call “racism” is actually a bias for- or against people with heavy pain-bodies?

What if the reason why so many African Americans are incarcerated, for example, is not because of their skin color, but because their individual and collective pain-bodies are so dense that our society doesn’t know collectively how else to proceed?

And remember, all suffering has a flip side.  So, what if the desire to incarcerate is a manifestation of the same collective pain-body?

Whatever we call that (pain-body-ism?), it would certainly mirror racism in its affect.  And, it would definitely cling statistically along racial lines.  Why?  Because African Americans have a pronounced collective pain-body.

The word “collective” is obviously a generalization that I’m using here (and that Tolle uses) to construct an image of what is prevalent on a large scale.

Meanwhile, no matter what race, humans have a way of detecting whether or not somebody walking down the street has a heavy pain-body. Animals can detect it too. Dogs start barking. Horses get jumpy. Birds fly away. And — surprise, surprise — people stop hiring.  They avoid.  They go the other way.

Or, they seek to feed off of it in order to nurture their own pain-bodies. That person with the pain-body burden becomes a “victim” of one thing or another, always unconsciously sucked into someone else’s drama. Other pain-bodies seek them out. This is where profiling comes into its own.

You can say that’s racism, but this aspect has nothing to do with race.

If we understand the pain-body, we might soon realize that nothing “always happens to me.”

What if rather than preaching “stop racism,” which in and of itself helps sustain the collective pain-bodies of blacks as well as whites, we begin to build our understanding of “presence” and consciousness?

Oprah did it.  Along with Eckhart Tolle, she reached 40 million people.  But you don’t have to be Oprah to simply begin the process yourself.

Remember, the mere recognition of a pain-body makes it go away.

“Peace on earth begins with personal peace,” Tolle suggests.  It’ll take all of us.  Are you striving for personal peace?

The alternative is that, individually and collectively, we will repeat the same pattern in an endless cycle, feeding the same collective pain-body over and over again.

“Human beings are meant to evolve into conscious beings and those who don’t will suffer the consequences of their unconsciousness,” Tolle says.  “They are out of alignment with the evolutionary impulse of the universe.”

Media Reactions

I was going to print a collection of reactions to this event from the coverage in leading sectors of the media, especially the opinions and perspectives from the most popular editorials and blogs.

But then I realized that it might be better if I gave readers themselves some “homework.”

Homework

Take a look at your own favorite and trusted sources for news and opinions. No doubt, their views may have been well-written, impassioned, and full of many excellent points.

Knowing what you now know, did they provide real insight and awareness?  Or did they add more drama and food for the collective pain-body?

Examine your own personal reaction.  Was it a pain-body reaction?

Brothers and Sisters

Some of this is generalization but I think it helps illustrate important points.

Many black people can easily spot another black person with a heavy pain-body. In fact, we even use terminology like “he’s down with us” and “he’s keepin’ it real” and “he’s into the struggle” and the ever popular “it’s a black thang, you wouldn’t understand it.”

The existence of the pain-body explains why some African Americans look at other African Americans as “not black enough” or “not as black as me” or “blacker” than others.  The whole discussion of racial “authenticity” centers around this false notion.

It also helps explain the generations-old friction between African Americans and other people of African descent — Haitians, Dominicans, Jamaicans, Africans, and so on — who are subconsciously perceived as not having as heavy nor dense of a collective pain-body as the descendants of slaves in America.

White people do the same thing. They wonder, “Is Obama really black?” Or they say outright, “He’s not black.”  What they really mean is, “He doesn’t have the same historical accumulation of unresolved negative emotions around the issue of race relations in America inherited from his forefathers as other blacks do.” That is to say, they believe his pain-body is not as heavy or dense as is the collective African American pain-body.

Of course, that isn’t necessarily the case.

Let’s mention something else.  White folks aren’t off the hook; they’ve got have a heavy and dense pain-body too, and its just as easily activated by the slightest pretext.

The “angry white man” has just as many accumulated unresolved negative emotions. Because, both the victims and the perpetrators of brutality suffer over time.

Those unresolved negative emotions include guilt, shame, and fear.

And anger, over what they see as their non-involvement in the sins of their ancestors.  But the pain-body can be passed along from generation to generation.  It can be inherited, or it can be absorbed, as is the case with recent immigrants whose ancestors were never involved in slavery.  Though relatively new to this country, they too possess a portion of the collective pain-body associated with the history of race relations in America.

Many people with “mixed-race” parents go through a period of painful “soul-searching” in this regard, trying to understand how and where they fit in.  Sometimes, subconsciously, their ego is trying to determine why their pain-body is not as heavy as that of other “real” African Americans. The ego often responds by trying its best to create some sort of drama in hopes that the resulting pain and suffering can somehow compete, just so the person can have a sense of belonging, at least in that dimension. This of course could lead to insanity. But some people do it.

Often the children of mixed-race parents come out of this self-identification process much wiser and more enlightened, mainly because they didn’t inherit any one cultural ideology by default and therefore had to develop their own, based on a more conscious observation of the realities surrounding them.

President Obama seems to have been in this latter group.

For many black men, obsession with pain-body comparisons may manifest as fear of success, that is, fear of “selling out.” Which is to say, many black men have a sense of self that is derived so completely from identification with their own pain-body that they are not willing to dis-identify with it for fear of losing their identity.

This explains the whole “angry black man” syndrome.

They must then feed that pain-body with more negative thoughts along the lines of “I wasn’t going to get that job anyway.”

If such a person receives a compliment, their response might then be, “He just said that because he’s white and I’m black.”

Anything to feed the pain-body.

This perverse twisting is the result of having created one’s own identity out of the pain-body itself. Whole cultures do it. This comes from being so confused about the difference between one’s situation and one’s reaction to the situation that one is no longer able to distinguish the difference between their true natural being and their pain-body. There is a clinical term for this and it is called insanity.

Would you hire someone who is insane?  Yes, if you are also insane. Many people are, in that regard.

Or, you might hire him or her anyway if you understand that all it takes is awareness of the pain-body of another in order to look past, making it possible to sense the true nature of that person’s being.  This action by itself will help dissipate the collective pain-body by slowing down its feeding process.  Many of America’s best corporations already do this subconsciously, and it’s reflected in their hiring practices, workplace atmosphere, and, ultimately, in their profitability.

Instead of avoiding someone else’s pain-body, why don’t we learn how to dissipate our own, and therefore those of others?  The best way to handle someone who is highly unconscious is to be more conscious.

It takes practice.  Can we do it?

Humanity

The rest of humanity looks to the United States of America for clues about what to do.  They have their own ways and means, but they still look to us because they have similar problems.

Instead of racism they have nationalism, or religious strife, or ethnic conflict, or tribal warfare.  In some cases they actually do also have racism.  These conditions go back not just hundreds- but often thousands of years.

This means that their corresponding individual and collective pain-bodies may go back that far.

If we can figure this out here in America, the rest of the world will too.  Because the same principles apply.

In any case, are we humans ready to transcend race, ethnicity, class, culture, religion, and other arbitrary barriers?

I’m not saying that groups should drop their racial, cultural, or ethnic pride and customs.  These are essential in helping us to experience the joy of who we are.

Beer

Alcohol is known to trigger the pain-body.

Enough said.

Look, this incident was the perfect storm for creating the the “Mother of All Teachable Moments.”

Three people — the perfect ingredients, perfectly choreographed — came together to make it possible.

Think about it.  If the white cop, let’s say, had had a prior record of racial profiling or police brutality … if the black professor had had a prior record of, for example, racially inflammatory lectures or fringe opinions … if the President had not been black, nor used the word “stupidly” … then this could not have turned into the teachable moment that it has become.

So let’s honor the moment for what it is.

I understand the euphemism of working something out “over a beer.”  But the President may give people the wrong impression that the only way to resolve a difficult issue is by escaping into alcohol.

That couldn’t be further away from what is needed most — presence, consciousness, awareness, awakening.

Remember, all that’s required to release the pain-body is recognition of it.

I have an idea.  Why not conduct this “over a beer” meeting on The Oprah Winfrey Show, without the beer?

It would give people all over the world a chance to really understand the pain-body and how it works as illustrated through this incident, through these men.  Beyond merely satisfying the usual curiosity about the details of what happened, more importantly this would be a chance for people to discover what’s going on in their own lives, within themselves.

Our individual and collective pain-bodies are crippling America from within.

It’s a matter of national interest. Do we really want to discuss it over a beer?

Higher Ground

When a person with a heavy pain-body dis-identifies with it, the accumulated negative energy that was stored there is released and converts into consciousness at a higher frequency. This is why the most enlightened and conscious people in the world are often those who once experienced a significant amount of pain and suffering.

Isn’t it worth looking forward to that?

Finally, I just can’t help but say this:  Converting historically accumulated negative emotions into higher-frequency consciousness is just another way of saying “Make History Now.” :-)