Face Everything and Avoid Nothing

Face Everything and Avoid Nothing The third tenet of Evolutionary Enlightenment is called Face Everything and Avoid Nothing. This tenet points us to our potential to experience unobstructed awareness—awareness that is free from the psychological self-protective habit of avoidance. The liberation of awareness has been the goal of spiritual enlightenment for millennia. And when we see enlightenment in an evolutionary context, this perennial ideal is equally important. It leads to a kind of clarity, transparency, and inner freedom that is the essential foundation for conscious evolution. Like all the tenets, Face Everything and Avoid Nothing is both the path and the goal. This means that if you have reached the goal, if you are identifying more with your Authentic Self than you are with your ego, then the conscious or unconscious motives within you to avoid this degree of transparency will have been largely transcended. But if you are still identified with ego to a significant degree, then the intentional and deliberate practice of facing everything and avoiding nothing will be the powerful means through which you will gain access to a similar level of spiritual attainment. To the degree that your consciousness is freed from the ego's agenda of narcissistic self-protection and becomes focused on the evolutionary impulse, you will experience the emergence of your own Authentic Self, the nature of which is buoyant, joyful, awake, and future-oriented. In contrast, the ego is absorbed in every moment by its personal fears and concerns, and this obscures your capacity to experience the immediacy of evolutionarily enlightened awareness. Most of us, with rare exceptions, are deeply invested, consciously or unconsciously, in maintaining the status quo. The ego, both personal and cultural, has numerous emotional, psychological, and historically conditioned agendas that take priority over the evolution of consciousness. The ego is deeply invested in maintaining a certain image of itself and of reality, and will do so at any cost—even if it means avoiding and denying the truth of how things actually are. Therefore, most of us have many reasons to avoid and to deny, to repress and to suppress, to deceive and to conceal. If you have spent a lifetime identified primarily with your ego—with your personal story and with outdated and unenlightened cultural values—it is likely that the posture of avoidance is deeply habitual. Facing everything and avoiding nothing then becomes a powerful path and practice for catalyzing the evolution of consciousness. If you are bold in your spiritual intention, if you dare to heroically aspire to take responsibility for evolution's next step, you simply cannot afford to have your awareness obscured by the ego's need to avoid. Indeed, for those of us who have awakened to the impulse to evolve, and who understand, at least to some degree, that the destiny of the interior of the cosmos is dependent upon our conscious evolution, cultivating clarity, transparency, and inner freedom becomes a matter of great urgency. If you are deeply committed to this evolutionary endeavor, you will want to face everything and avoid nothing, because the last thing you want to do is to act out of some unconscious motive in such a way that would obstruct your own higher development. You practice the third tenet as if your life depended on it, because when your life is dedicated to the evolution of consciousness and culture, it does. Spiritual practice, in one form or another, has always been about the cultivation of awareness. This is why I call Face Everything and Avoid Nothing the ultimate form of spiritual practice. But we need to be prepared for what this practice will reveal. Sincerely engaging with the third tenet inevitably brings to light one of the most notorious faces of the ego: the perennial attachment to pride and self-image. Doesn't your ego have a particular self-image that it is deeply attached to? It might be a very positive picture, or it might be quite a negative one. It might be a culturally constructed ideal. If you look honestly at your own experience, you will see that it is an image that you work very hard to maintain. How do you maintain it? By filtering out information that conflicts with that picture in any way. What happens when you see something about yourself that doesn't fit neatly with your self-image? You push it away, to the very edge of your awareness, and if you are successful, you banish it altogether. This process is occurring in large and small ways in most of us all the time. Like a camera lens, focusing and refocusing, we constantly frame our own perspective on reality to reflect the picture of ourselves that we want to see. Ego, in this sense, is a defense mechanism, designed to protect the self from what it feels may be "too much" reality. As long as we are primarily identified with the narrow world of the personal self, the lens of our perception will always be, to some degree, blinded by pride, ever-obstructing our capacity to experience liberated awareness and fearless transparency. * * * A liberated relationship to life is one that is no longer dominated by the culturally conditioned desire to maintain the status quo, to preserve the self-image we already hold dear. You recognize that that image creates a barrier, a wall that shields the self from a deeper embrace of reality. Facing everything and avoiding nothing is a powerful tool with which to pierce that barrier, to shatter the ego's defenses in every moment. When you are committed to the aspiration to be liberated, this practice is a source of tremendous energy and inspiration, because in every moment, it has the power to remove the barriers to the emergence of your own Authentic Self. Even for the most committed spiritual practitioner, facing everything and avoiding nothing is an enormous challenge. Never underestimate the power of the conditioned and often unconscious will to avoid, the tenacity of the ego's investment in its self-image. If you have not yet become clear about the first tenet—about the fundamental issue of what is most important to you—the practice of paying attention won't necessarily help you be more awake. It will just end up being the personal self watching itself, which is like the ego looking in the mirror. You may perform different spiritual practices, which can help you to cultivate awareness, focus, and attention, but only if you want to evolve beyond ego will paying attention have the power to shatter the ever-selective mirror of pride. As long as we remain invested in the ego's need to manipulate reality, we will find that we keep making the same mistakes, over and over and over again, because we are deliberately avoiding aspects of the way things are. It's not a mystery: if we are trying to get somewhere, but we cover our eyes to avoid seeing the obstacles that lie in our path, it's no wonder we keep tripping over them. Unless we awaken to a deeper, spiritually inspired conscience, the posture of avoidance easily becomes habitual. This is how it works: When we first choose—consciously or unconsciously—to avoid something, it may be initially uncomfortable, but very quickly that state of avoidance becomes normal. Deep in our hearts we may know that it's wrong to live in denial of whatever the issue may be, but when we decide that for whatever reason it's just too much to face, we give ourselves license to ignore our own conscience. And before long, it becomes comfortable to remain in that state of denial—in fact, it gets easier and easier. If we don't face things, within hours, if not minutes, the posture of avoidance becomes tolerable. Aren't there times when you experience a kind of numbness in relationship to something you know you should not feel at ease with? Imperceptibly, it just sets in, like ice dulling the pain of an injury, until we feel no discomfort at all. In this way, slowly but surely, avoidance becomes a habit. Of course, on a spiritual level, a soul level, it's never comfortable. But the point is that when you choose to avoid, you lose touch with your own soul. Emotionally, you become disconnected from your own deeper dimensions. It's as if there is a wall, a barrier, between you and your own authenticity. And far too many of us get accustomed to living like this. The degree to which we avoid and deny is the degree to which the inner wall of pride that is ego will continue to strengthen. If we are in the habit of constant avoidance, ego becomes hard and impermeable, and every time we choose to avoid something, that wall gets reinforced. Avoidance literally creates ego, and the ego's ability to reinforce its own walls is quite extraordinary. It's not a game—some human beings will go so far as to damage their own souls because they don't want to face themselves. But the moment we stop avoiding, those walls will begin to crumble. What most of us are unaware of is that every time we choose to avoid, we are holding back the current of the evolutionary impulse, that surge of enlightened energy and intelligence, from working through us. So when you begin to awaken and to intuit that the very purpose of human incarnation is to cooperate with that impulse, to become nothing less than its partner in the creative process, your spiritual obligation is to remove all the barriers to your own potential for higher development by facing everything and avoiding nothing at all times, in all places, under all circumstances. * * * Always remember: facing everything really does mean everything. And if this practice is going to have the power to liberate, it always has to happen now—never tomorrow, or in the future, or at any time other than the present moment. That is what is so powerful about the third tenet: it is the immediacy of its demand that challenges the ego in such a fundamental way. The liberating power of this tenet is only accessed through living it without conditions, always now. This radical immediacy is what destroys the ego's defenses. The ego always insists that you need more time before you are ready to let go. That's its job—to censor and control your experience, to avoid and postpone, endlessly. If there is integrity in your aspiration to consciously evolve, however, you won't need any more time. When you are committed, the time is always now. Good intentions for the future only flatter the ego. Unless you intend to do it now, you won't do it. When you Face Everything and Avoid Nothing now, you transcend the ego right now. And if you keep facing everything and avoiding nothing, always now, you will transcend the ego in every moment. * * * As you begin to engage with this practice, it is important to understand that facing everything and avoiding nothing is a very different practice than assuming the removed position of the witness or observer, as we often do in a meditative posture. In the meditative position, we assume no relationship to the content of consciousness. But when we Face Everything and Avoid Nothing, we choose to have an active relationship with the content of consciousness. When you do this, your soul is undefended, and you will find, as a result, that you not only see a lot more but you also feel a lot more. You are much more sensitive to the extremes and fluctuations of your internal responses. When you remove the protective shield of avoidance and self-protection, there is an intensity and vulnerability to the human experience. All the complexity of life hits you more directly. So once again, facing everything and avoiding nothing is not merely a state of observing or bearing witness to your own experience. It demands that you be emotionally willing to bear a degree of reality—both in regard to yourself and to life itself—that you may have been unwilling to tolerate before. When we Face Everything and Avoid Nothing, we become aware of a much broader spectrum of human nature. If we intend to evolve, we have to embrace the emotional and spiritual challenge of facing directly into both the overwhelming brightness of our own highest potentials and the heartless corruption of our darkest motives. Allow yourself to expand the spectrum of possibilities you are willing to see. On one hand, you will glimpse a higher level of glory and goodness than you ever dreamed possible. On the other, you will become more acutely aware of the lower drives in the human psyche—primitive motives and impulses that can be frightening, shocking, and humiliating to the ego's self-image. Because you are facing everything and avoiding nothing, you allow yourself to see it all without recoil, without pride, without resistance. It takes a very big heart and a truly courageous interest in our collective higher development to bear the entire spectrum of human potential, in and as yourself, without flinching. Most of us unknowingly cling to a self-image that resists extremes—always in denial of our darkness, and ever-fearful of the overwhelming brightness of our unexplored heights. A heroic practice of the third tenet enables you to fearlessly face these extremes—because you want to evolve more than you want to hold on to any particular image of yourself. If you want to be an enlightened person, if you want to evolve beyond individual and cultural ego, if you want to develop your higher human potentials in many dimensions simultaneously, you will find that you are no longer attached to a fixed notion of self. You no longer see yourself as a static entity. You are a work in progress, and because of that, you are no longer so afraid of the truth. * * * As the walls of self-protective denial and avoidance crumble, you will feel yourself waking up—waking up to the nature of consciousness, waking up to the human experience, waking up to the complex workings of individual and collective development. Your eyes will open wider; you will sit up straight. You will start paying greater attention to your own internal experience, interested in the way changing states of consciousness impact how the world appears to you. You will learn to recognize the many dimensions of the self and understand what causes them to come to the fore or fall back and disappear. You will feel a growing appreciation for the entire spectrum of human nature—from the primitive drives and impulses of our collective evolutionary past to the glorious newly emerging potentials at the leading edge of higher human development. You will start to be able to engage with and cultivate the very best parts of yourself. And you will be aware of unwholesome and destructive impulses when they arise within you and, therefore, will be in a position to take responsibility for them. All of this will emerge in your awareness because you are facing everything and avoiding nothing—because you want to liberate the self from the narrow-minded agendas of your personal ego and the outdated perspectives of the culturally conditioned self so that consciousness will always be free to evolve through you. When you truly Face Everything and Avoid Nothing, you will no longer be afraid to stand tall—before your own conscience, before others, before God. This is because you are no longer hiding anything from yourself. Through this noble practice, you will cultivate integrity and discover the kind of soul-strength that only comes from fearlessly facing the truth. The instinctive defense mechanisms that the ego hides behind will crumble, and your self and soul will become a transparent vehicle through which the evolutionary impulse can work in this world.