Dr. Carr offers unique and deeply moving approaches to each of the following gentle challenges that we are naturally drawn to as human animals (consciously or unconsciously). Check with your “evolutionary impulse” deep inside to see if you feel a resonance with, and a curiosity to explore these following perspectives, stated as essential (a gentle “must”) for growth and awakening in today's world:
1) Enlightenment is essential: Enlightenment is a necessity and today can be done in relationship and in a larger culture of awakening. We can support each other to be on our “path” to awakening, exploring and evolving. We must feel and see what is essential to us and also fully embody and fully ground our enlightening. We must naturally stay present, mindful, and centered. We must bring our enlightenment to the modern world and it's problems. We must fully stand on, and act from, our own ground of being. We must see, feel, rest in, and embody inseparable, un-qualifiable, intelligent spaciousness and act and create from that. We must become both developmentally enlightened, as well as enlightened in our awakened states of consciousness.
2) We are part of a conscious field of evolving in the room (and all parts of each elephant), that most of us are blind “meta-perspectives”: We must approach others, and the world from many perspectives or lenses, and from evolving meta-perspectives (or perspectives on perspectives). We need to see all the elephants in the room that we are unwilling to look at. We must address many myths and misconceptions, especially ones about emotions, spirituality, and society. We must trust that when we are ready to see something truly new we will see it.
3) We can glimpse that there are always higher levels of development to attain: We must be willing to let go of much of our old reality box to attain our new one. We must let our impulse to evolve and awaken to move us on. We must listen to our “creative discontent”. It Is important to find and stay on one's true evolutionary path and fully explore our own current reality box, constantly updating ourselves for our next one. We must be exquisitely sensitive to those on different levels of development than ourselves, and yet stay on our own path.
4) We are moved to learn consciousness and awakening skills: We ourselves, parents, and schools should have their central focus on the continued bring all of us into full existence through practicing and teaching: being, sensing, feeling, connecting, communicating, and cognizing skills. We should have a strong meditation practice as well as life practices in all areas of life.
5) We can move to transcend what is considered “normal”: There are many human abilities that transcend thinking and even time-space that must be developed. There are many different conscious states to explore. Including “the stateless state” of non-duality.
6) Allowing reality to come, through by putting aside authority as we look at the world: We must explore, discover and see for ourselves, free of all internal or external authority, beliefs, traditions or dogma. We must see if it is possible to see the world according to no one. We must learn to “shut up and look”. Intelligent reality and life are always there to come through to us when we are ready, if we are interested and open to learning with beginner's mind. Often instead, we superimpose our thoughts on it and line our reality box with mirrors instead of windows. We must question absolutely everything.We must let life itself, as it emerges from moment to moment, be our highest teacher. We must become a trust-based system and trust and see ourselves as life. Then we incorporate and integrate what is useful from the views of others whether they are respected authorities or novices.
7) Non-local consciousness and conscious fields are part of who we are and of what the world is. It helps to learn to use and trust your “first sense”. Sadly, in modern cultures, this necessary life navigation ability has atrophied. Spiritual and psychological remote viewing are wonderful ways to relearn and amplify our innate abilities in new powerful ways. Also, “Intelligent” non-local “conscious” and “formative fields” in our universe probably help shape us and who we are for millions of years. Research shows that consciousness appears to be embedded in all things.
8) Learning to surrender to ourselves, to others and to the Kosmos. We must see that the voluntary rests on the involuntary, the involuntary rests on life and life rests on and in the Kosmos. Through pure intention and our own clarity, we must allow a space in which intelligent, conscious homeostatic self-organization can occur, within us and in our environment.
9) We are part of a field that creates and evolves “We-spaces”: We are social animals; we need each other and we want to belong. We can co-create conscious, ever-evolving communities we truly belong to. It is essential that we learn to give honest feedback to each other in groups. We need to awaken together, grow together, and heal together from both individual and collective trauma. Lets join in to create a conscious formative, energetic group “field” or autonomous “we-space” at the highest possible level.
10) Getting all parts of ourselves fully online. We must heal, bring forth, and integrate all parts of ourselves including the parts we are allergic to, or are afraid or ashamed of. Many parts of ourselves go “offline” from the collective trauma of schooling, religion, isolation from nature and each other, fatherlessness etc. We must allow ourselves to have “prototypical experiences” to experience that which we didn't know was possible. All parts should have their rightful place at the table. We have hundreds of senses and hundreds of cognitive and emotional ways of processing all of which need to be explored.
11) Integrating“everything”, particularly awakening, seeing, evolving, connecting, feeling, sensing, healing, growing, doing and the often neglected “healthy primitive”. We want all parts of ourselves (especially the “forbidden” parts) finding their rightful place at the table and talking to each other. In the process, we must vomit up (or chew up and restructure) the behaviors and perspectives that no longer serve us. We must take some moments to act and speak from being fully informed by all parts of who we are.
12) Taking a compassionate perspective that we are beautiful primates living in a human zoo: We humans are beautiful tribal primates now living in “zoo-like” super-tribes separated from nature and hence misbehave like zoo animals. We should be compassionate towards our species and ourselves. We must be aware of the potential damage we can do to ourselves when we are out of balance as a species. We must look at ourselves the third, fourth and fifth person perspective
13) We can heal the “normal”: Human stuckness, woundedness, traumatization, pathology and ample “shadow” are the current norm in what can be referred to as “malignant normality”. This wounding gets passed from generation to generation in a process some call “the emotional plague”. This “normality” is an elephant in the room that must be fully seen and healed. We must discern subtle contrasts in ourselves and society that are very hard to see.
14) Psychological pain and trauma are deeply stored in the brain, repeated in patterns and can be healed: This pain is encapsulated by beliefs and defenses. These defenses that protect us must be deeply honored. The stored pain beneath (stored in the limbic system and brainstem), must be allowed to surface and be released from storage in a safe environment for full healing to occur. Shadow and trauma must be addressed and deeply witnessed. We must recognize when we or others are triggered and then listen with full presence, or authentically express and own who we are with others, in ways that nourish, heal, and reconnect. We must not get trapped in either an allergy to, or an addiction to our wounds. (Many of which, may still be unconscious shadow, no matter how highly developed we are)
15) Projection can be all-powerful in individual and societal behavior: Projection is a huge unexamined force that runs most of our views and behaviors and we must learn to re-own our projections. Projections run most of the world’s human affairs. Projections are mistaken for perceptions. Most often our reality boxes are lined with mirrors we mistake as windows. We must also look at introjection (swallowing things whole) and retroflection (turning things back on ourselves). We must be aware of our boundaries: that delightful sense of where I end and you begin.
16) Restoring a dynamic Homeostatic balance to life polarities such as: Individual - communal
personal responsibility - collective responsibility, cooperation - competition, interiority - exteriority
subjectivity - objectivity etc.
Dr. Carr uses a huge variety of, often unique tools and techniques in his workshops. All of these integrated techniques help us “wake up, face up, clean up, grow up, and show up” with minimal “f**k up”
