| Our Way Off Autopilot: Cross Balancing Tao for a Mindful Self and World |
| We have a Health Crisis: We need to be Waking Off an Autopilot set of patterns The crisis is Spiritual, Mental, Emotional, Physical, Societal, Political, Economic, Ecological and Global. The solution is not exactly simple... Without our recognizing it we have been automated - set into Polarized Beliefs about Who We Are: Winner or Loser, Worthy or Worthless. “To know that you do not know is the best. To pretend to know when you do not know is a disease." Lao-tzu, The Way of Lao-tzu |
| Our way Off Autopilot: Cross Balancing Tao for a Mindful Self and World Mindfulness is only fed by noticing. Our world labors in war and stress, unmindful in both person and society. That shallowness can mute pain or boredom, yet it automates us. How? We live in layers - subconscious either/or impulses up to a present focus of attention. Children are taught: channel your instincts to Normal, ignore having been trained then automate that ignoring. Like background software, since then you've had a hard to notice array of 'simplifying filters', running on their own, original information. We believe we're fully alert, caring and mature. Non-mindfulness is, however, a pandemic disease in each self, every society. Why does this matter? In a few words - as seven billion of us are thus controlled - all the conflict and misery on the planet, I believe. If Pilot denotes the most mindful aspect of self guiding a life, I call what leads our ignoring of balancing it the Autopilot. It's a set of four habit styles: belief/action Personas, like viruses that spread out to our interpersonal, institutional and cultural realities - then back into each new child. Inside, as quasi autonomous identities, they are that training of your conscious/subconscious mindbody or Biosystem. The four filters are scripts for taking in and then acting on past or present experience, whenever you - as awake, mindful Pilot of your life - are at least partly absent. |
| Diagrams of Your Autopilot The link above is to a quick Overview of the Autopilot, its development and styles: Pushing, Negating, Bridging & Dreaming. The ways you are caught by the automation of your awareness can be shown as having evolved from the struggle of Yin and Yang as you arrived in this life. The four patterns or styles of the Autopilot are there in each of us - as well as in all the patterns of every society on the planet. |
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| Consider these suggestions or hypotheses: Any Anger, Controllingness Psychopathy, Sociopathy or Mania within self or with others: this is where Intent is still not clear or balanced - the narcissistic quadrant of Autopilot reality where PUSHING is yet to be Reformed - beyond enacting Dominance. Any Depression, Boredom or Being Unhappily Controlled: this is where Sensitivity is still to be opened. It’s the bodily consciousness within your Autopilot where being overly NEGATING has yet to be Empowered - beyond Victimhood. Any Anxiety (guilt, worry or other out of balance bodily energy) is a vacillation - caught in polarity, partially aware of stressing self and others, all while trying to stick to Autopilot BRIDGING - to Routinizing Normality. As increasingly mindless action you are unable to shift or expand conscious perspective. This routinized, Normal approach is a false 'right action', believing self is only Yang, a presuming you've heard the whole truth of Tao. The listening and the action have been automated, the spontaneous Mindful process obscured. Any Addiction is Mindless Intake. It is you stuck in Autopilot DREAMING, unable to shift or expand conscious perspective. This vacuity is a false innocence, a waiting to hear some form of answer from your Middle while believing no action is needed. In response to societies expectations of work and good citizenship in the Bridging area of the Autopilot, the Dreaming sector is how society rewards you: get drunk, stoned, addicted to web surfing, shopping or passive, unmindful TV watching. Overall, healing the patterns between those states of Anger or Depression, Anxiety or Addiction are where Dominant PUSHING and Victimized NEGATING, routinized BRIDGING and sleepy DREAMING have yet to be Harmonized in Mindfulness. My overall hypothesis to you? Honouring those processes of Reformation, Empowerment and Mindfulness will lead to your evolving Enlightenment. |
| Waking Our Selves Off Autopilot In the last diagram below, the larger, outside ring from the diagram above is now reversed. In place of enacting Pushy Dominance you are Asserting as clear Balancing ENERGY. Instead of suffering as Negating Victim you are Accepting the OPENNESS of Balancing. Living beyond Scripted Bridging you bring COMPASSION to your world. Having real capacity to wake up from Dreaming, you have true PATIENCE for the healing of the world. You are then finding yourself choosing more and more to be Mindful: beyond the lies or half truths of your own (or anyone else's) Autopilot patterns. |
| Click photo above for You Tube Intro Rap |
| The Autopilot has you and me, our relationships and our whole world Caught. (For a quasi-humorous quick summary of how these four styles can be characterized - in the Four Autopilot Pigs Parable - click here) On Autopilot none of us are able to Flow. Within the matched divisions of these four either/or styles we are always (at some level) in Conflict. I'll prove this to you. The quadrants in the chart below are my names for these forms of automation. As any of them you are incomplete - not whole, not mindful. Segmented, while On Autopilot in most cases you’re usually only aware of yourself as one - maybe two - of these four modes or personality styles at a time… Two of these are our more Normal states, two are more Instinctual, usually only experienced when stressed - or stressing... Reflect on the diagram below for a bit and see which is which and if any of that is wrong. Our Biggest Problem is with the Bully/Victim entanglement that we all have underneath. Then we also have a crisis evolving with the people (leaders, dictators, CEOs et al) in our societies who intuitively understand these mindbody habits... They use their knowledge to even more deeply Tyrannize you, our world and the societal structures we depend upon for support. Bridging is the default, normal, compulsively working, somewhat actively mindless style we usually believe ourselves to be (or who we should be…) When stressed or tired, your next default position is Dreaming (passive mindlessness, thus alcohol, substance, TV, web surfing, food or some other addiction arrives.) These two are our Normal World of: Work hard, Play easy… The other two styles (Negating and Pushing) are usually less overtly conscious areas - until you’re Really Stressed or wanting to Do the Stressing… Victim and Bully respectively. All four Autopilot Styles are like Biosystem Scripts for our Living. They have also been projected out into our societies for thousands of years. Now they operate through societal institutions that Structure our whole world... These four areas shift and change in you based in immediate yet also long term internal and external circumstances, consciously or non-consciously. We interact with each other, within ourselves and with our worldly environments far too often in these modalities, caught believing these four styles are 'who we are'. Consider the implications: check out Bridging or Pushing as your two Output Options. They are seemingly you Piloting the self - and your World (!) into the Future... Yet there is possibly very little of you Mindfully balancing all four sectors of self for advancing your life. That means, to put it in Eastern terms, that what is Not Conscious, Your Intake, your Past - your Karma - will be unconsciously effecting how you're in Charge of your life. By contrast, say you live Dreaming or Negating, your focus on Intake, on the Past - how you've been Stressed. Identifying yourself with those, you'll always either dreamily be wanting something better, unable to attain it or else passively aggressively attempting to negate self - or others in your life You'll end up Numbed Out or else exhausted and depressed. Some choice you have between these four, yes? Point is, you need All Four Sectors - renewed in the Now... These are your only four options whenever you are Not Noticing where (thus who) you are. Try it out. You can feel for them within self or else over there in others in your life. |
Below is the same diagram from above shifted over into a Taoist format. Here your Intake (the Stressed Self) is in black and your Output (the Stressing Self) is in white. Self Promoting is more on the upper half and Self Denying more on the lower half of the diagram. This Mandala is actually a three dimensional representation. As you look at this, your Past is behind you and your future would be represented by you journeying through this page, day - or computer screen! |
| All Images, all Text Copyright B. Johnston-Spooner, 2011 |