legna

As some of you know, I'm a lifelong atheist who found sobriety in a twelve step program. I've just skipped over the God bits as I 'trudged the road'. Monday at 4:30pm driving to what turned into my last shift at work before being fired from the only job I've ever been fired from, I found my higher power. I remain atheist except I realize that I have had a hp and I know what it is now.

Nothing has changed and everything has changed. Interesting.

Zencat

I like awaking's as those. Even as I maintain a core worldview such as being an atheist, I endeavor to be always open to possibilities and mystery.

Harveysmiles

Legna
Can you elaborate as I remain perplexed by your post yet would love to hear more?

legna

Hiya Harvey, sure. Where to start? I'm Native American which plays into this a bit so I should probably mention that. Too, I didn't arrive at my lack of belief in a God haphazardly; I did quite a bit of searching. Within my searching, I did find quite a bit that I agreed with, things that resonated with me even if I thought the God bits were metaphors. I should probably point out that I also gave much more weight to those principles and beliefs that seemed to transcend time, distance and philosophies.

Regardless of whether God existed or not, I wanted to live what I felt was a moral life and so when I found principles such as "Do unto others..." that was repeated throughout many religions and philosophies, I set it aside to use until which time that I decided it was valid or not.

Okay, preface completed....moving on:

I ran into Huna which basically said that there was a higher, middle and lower self. Without delving too deep, Huna's explanation of the three selves was pretty much in keeping with idea's in psychology. So there was a match between competing (or apparently competing) ideas. Too, its beliefs closely resembled ideas present in my Native heritage. This isn't to say that I gravitated because of familiarity but only because of another match.

One of the ideas I found fascinating that was unique to Huna (in my studies to that point) was that the 'arrangement' of the selves wasn't how I would have expected it. It went:

Higher self
Lower self
Middle self

According to Huna philosophy, the middle self which is the ego, conscious mind or robot self could not have direct access to the higher self but needed to basically petition the lower self to bring whatever issue, thought, etc. to the higher self. It required the selves to work together. That brought me to do some work in early recovery that I wrote up elsewhere and will cut and paste for convenience:

...so I kept an eye out while moving on to the fourth step and fifth step. Those completed, I decided to go to college. My sponsor sent me off with a stuffed animal baby mountain lion. The significance of that being that my totem animal (recall that we are both Native American). Well, the mountain lion is anyway...the 'baby' part was me. :P

Turns out her use of a 'child' mountain lion was pretty appropriate. My explorations to this point kept pointing to childhood programming and within that programming I saw where I was experiencing life through the experiences of me as a child. i.e. I realized that I wasn't viewing situations as they are - but as they were. Hmm, not saying this well...

I found that I was unconsciously reacting to life via my childhood programming. I was feeling powerless many times as an adult when in fact, I was not. I felt rage over being ignored...not because I was being ignored at the customer service counter today but because of the 672,492 times I had felt ignored as a child and the anger simply piggybacked onto this customer service person. Okay, said that better this time.

So I decided to talk to that child and see if I couldn't work something out somehow. Maybe I could help him out. So, I made a commitment to spend the last fifteen minutes of each day for the next thirty days talking to this part of me that had been injured and ignored for decades. I further decided I would utilize the stuffed animal as something tangible to project towards. I mean...the mountain lion is my spirit animal in my tradition...this is a baby or child mountain lion...seemed perfect.

Yup...so here I was on the thirtieth day in my dorm room at college talking to this stuffed animal and feeling pretty silly about now because it doesn't talk back, hasn't talked back, can't talk back and I feel no closer to making a breakthru today than I have for the last 29 days of wasted fifteen minute periods. I tried to console myself with the idea that I had wasted 7.5 hours of my life on stupider things as I flicked the light to turn it off and go to sleep when it screamed. It was scared of the dark. Correction, she was scared of the dark.

I threw the light back on. All these memories and fears and terrors and ...I had forgotten so much stuff but the floodgates were open now. I don't know what to say here but this changed my life more dramatically than almost any single event in it. There were a lot of questions, am I over here trying to fracture my personality on purpose? Can this possibly be a good thing? We try to heal from dissociative disorders, not create them... <-- all inner dialogue. Long story short, I did a modified fourth step for her.

She, by the way, has a name. Interesting little tidbit and explanation of how I try to honor this part of me... I've been having a bit of a time of it in one subforum of SR. Middle self me isn't moved by the fracas but lower self is. That part of me is completely against the idea of putting her name out there (here) cause she doesn't feel safe. I explored the idea of me not putting it out there and can't find a good reason not to, but the feelings of fear of doing so remain. No harm in not doing so, so I won't. If I thought it was important to do so, I'd be looking for ways to make that part of myself feel safe before doing so - and both the intellect side of me and the feelings side of me would work on it till we reached a compromise. If we hit an impasse, the intellect part of me would make the final call but the feelings side of me knows that I didn't dismiss it and that I thought it was for the best. Sort of like parenting.

Simplified, it's like my child telling me that the don't want to eat their broccoli. Since veggies are important, I would try to explain that. If that didn't work, I would explore with my child other vegetable alternatives that they do like. If we can't find any vegetables that they like, I might have to choose the one they dislike the least in order to insure that they get the nutrients they need while still respecting their dislike of veggies. Once upon a time my parenting skills would be nothing more than, "You'll eat them because I said you'll eat them. End of discussion." Which is a pretty poor way to treat anyone - let alone oneself.

Anywho, having healed the rift between the lower and middle selves created a more fluid movement between the middle and higher self. What's the higher self? The more time that passes, the more closely I tend to associate it with psychology's super-consciousness....and frankly, the less I feel the need to analyze it which are words that I was voted 'least likely to ever use' by my lower self.

What's my higher power then? When I turn to my lower self and say, I have a problem that intellect itself won't solve and I need help... I get it. Sometimes it may be my lower self just adding an emotional element to the issue and sometimes it sends it up the chain of command. So in essence, it's all of us - when we work together. I access my hp when I communicate with my lower self.

Here's a funny example I sometimes use, the inspiration of which came from a fellow named Dan Millman. I don't remember his quote exactly in his book "The Way of the Peaceful Warrior" but it's where I extrapolated my example:

Middle self (MS): We need to mediate.
Lower Self (LS): I don't want to - let's go to the movies.
MS: We really need to mediate.
LS: pfft...Do we still have cookies?
MS: You know, people who meditate regularly, are more at peace with themselves. They seem to have an aura about them.
LS: Or ice cream! We totally have ice cream!
MS: Chicks find that super hot.
LS: Or we could go to ....what was that last part?
MS: I said, chicks find that aura and peace of mind regular mediators have as super ho...
LS: Why aren't we meditating? Can you shut up already so we can start?

Lastly, just to insure you that I have not fractured my psyche and spawned some cool dissociative disorder, I'd like to point out that usually this inner dialogue happens too fast to catch... it is only when I slow way down and watch my thoughts do I see the back and forth.