Actualizations; You Don't Have to Rehearse to Be Yourself

Excerpted from
Actualizations; You Don't Have to Rehearse to Be Yourself
By Stewart Emery

The purpose of this book is to enable you to recognize the conditions that support the joyful workability of your relationships, and to contribute to your ability to create an environment in which your relationships become joyful, nurturing, satisfying adventures in mutual and personal growth.

Now, for most of us, exhilarating and satisfying adventures in growth seem like a fairy tale. Most of us would be happy if we could just get to the place where our relationships are not a source of pain and anguish.

To have our relationships become a source of joy and satisfaction, a reflection of our spiritual essence and of our love, would require nothing short of a complete transformation- and that is what this book is about.

It is about transforming our relationships. And not just our relationships with our husband or our wife, or with our boss or with our children. We are talking here about transforming our relationships with ourselves, our life, our work-about transforming our relationships with everything.

This may sound unrealistic. After all, how can we accomplish something that is as lofty as transformation by reading a book? Well, it is the idea that transformation is a rare and unusual occurrence that keeps it from becoming what it really is, our birthright

In the Actualizations Workshop, Carol and I have had the privilege of being with thousands of people as they transform their relationships-in one weekend, in one day, in one instant. And they leave with an altered, fresh, workable, and alive way of relating to their lives. Their age, background, and belief do not matter. When people experience who they are as lovable and capable human beings, transformation is a natural result.

We wondered about that We wondered why it is that when people discover that they are ultimately supportable, lovable, and capable, as they do in the workshop, everything changes. They transform; but transform from what? What is it that we think is true about us that we discover is not true? Is there one fundamental misconception we all have as human beings which keeps us from being individually and collectively successful as a species?

The Central Issue of Our Existence

Yes, it is the central issue of our existence. It is so fundamental to our experience as human beings that the only time we notice we have it is when, in some rare and magical moments, it suddenly disappears.

It is the experience of separation.

The experience of being human is the experience of being separate-of being unrelated, being outside of life, of needing to do something in order to make it. And the urge to assuage the feeling of separation has motivated civilization since time began.

The experience that we are separate is the source of our idea that we need an act in order to get by in the world. It is the root cause of our notion that who we are is simply not enough, that we have to lay something over the top of who we are in order to be all right.

"Well, then" we might say here, "if our problem is that we are separate, the solution seems obvious. End the separation. Find somebody and get into relationship. Find some way to heal the feeling of separation." A great idea. Except that we have been trying to accomplish this for thousands of years.

Our culture has more options, choices, and alternatives to quench the feeling of separation than any other in history. And yet, even with the Porsche or Mercedes in the garage of the summer home, even with all our achievements and acquisitions, at four o'clock in the morning the sense of separation still haunts our dreams.

We are coming to the important and difficult realization that more stuff, more relationships, more acquisitions will not extinguish the sense of separation. While it may seem to work for a little while, no form outside of ourselves is ever going to permanently heal that wound.

We cannot solve our problem of separation for the same reason we cannot blow out a picture of a candle.

Separation Is an Illusion

Separation is an illusion that we have made real by agreement. The fundamental nature of the universe is one of balance and harmony in relationship. There is no separation.

If there is no separation, where did we even get the idea? Let's just say here that that illusion is born when we are. Birth itself is an experience of separation; from that experience we build the illusion that we are separate, when in reality we are not.

We build our illusion out of a decision based upon a shortage of facts collected upon our entry into a reality that is new to us. We have no way of knowing that when we are born, our feeling of separation flows from an illusion that is built upon our lack of experience in the reality in which we find ourselves.

The physicalness of our predicament is very real. It is true that we can't make it alone in this world as babies. We cannot survive by ourselves. We feel alone and separate. But to come up with the conclusion that separation is fundamental to life based upon our limited observation is to tell ourselves a lie. We simply can't see that our feeling of being separate is a result of our limited perception of the true nature of the universe.

All our efforts to end our sense of separation are the attempt to solve a problem we do not have in the first place. Our life has become a collection of solutions to a problem we do not have.

Let us look at it another way. Being born is like waking up inside a dream and not knowing it. In our sleep we have amassed a garrison of devices and decisions to protect ourselves from the threat from outside. We seek to protect ourselves from all that we feel separate from. We have barricaded ourselves in our cabin to fight off the Indians while we wait in fervent hope for the cavalry to arrive and save us.

Well, I have good news and I have bad news. First, the bad news: the cavalry isn't coming. Sorry, but Rin Tin Tin, John Wayne, and the detachment from Fort Apache are not going to come riding over the hill. No one is going to save us from the Indians of our life.

When we really get the hopelessness of that fact, it may make us very sad. It will also allow us to get the good news. And the good news is, there aren't any Indians. There is only a universe that supports us in making life a joyful adventure or an endless nightmare. So while there is no hope, it is also true that there is no hope needed.

If that is true, then why does the world look the way it does? The answer is simple: we live in a universe that supports us, and we do not know that. We are under the dual illusion that there is somebody or something out there that is going to get us if we don't watch out (enter the Devil) and that there is somebody or something out there that is going to save us if we do watch out (enter God, Santa Claus, and an assorted cast of good guys). We see ourselves as ultimate victims-helpless pawns in a chess game between good and evil. None of this is happening, of course. We only think it is. And because we think it is happening, guess what? It is.