THE PROCESS
I said at the end of the last chapter "you will 're-live' or 're-visit' many of the key experiences from your past, which means the movies that surround you in the cocoon for the next little while will look very much the same as they did in the movie theater. Some of the characters involved may be slightly different than the first time through the movie, but the basic theme is the same or very similar. This time, however, you have the choice of changing your reaction and response to these experiences by seeing the power you assigned 'out there' to make your holographic universe seem real, and then letting go of the judgments, beliefs, and opinions you formed as a result."
Different scouts have different methods for processing the holographic experiences created for you in the cocoon by your Infinite I, and I doubt there’s a “right” way or a “wrong” way, or just one way.
There’s no question there’s only one place to end up – as a butterfly. But there may be as many ways to emerge from the cocoon as there are routes across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.
It might be helpful to look at a couple methods used by other scouts to give you a clue about where and how to find what works for you.
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Robert Scheinfeld, whom I have called my mentor, came up with a Process that goes something like this…
1. Remind yourself it isn’t real
2. Dive right smack into the middle of it
3. Feel the "discomfort energy" fully
4. When it reaches a peak, call it what it is and tell the truth about it
5. Reclaim your power from the creation
6. Express appreciation1
In other words, as you continue with your life, immersed in the movies in your cocoon, there will be times when an experience brings you less than total joy – “discomfort” Robert calls it, which includes mental discomfort as well as physical and emotional discomfort, all the way from a slight emotional reaction to intense pain and suffering. The easiest way to spot this is that you will wish something about your present hologram would change, because you don’t like some part (or all) of it very much.
Let’s be very clear and specific about what we mean by “discomfort.” Physical discomfort should be fairly obvious, ranging from an “owie” to severe and debilitating pain. Emotional or mental discomfort, on the other hand, can be a little more subtle.
L. Ron Hubbard invented an “emotional tone scale” in which he lists a lot of the “uncomfortable” emotions we can feel from time to time, including (in part): anger, antagonism, anxiety, apathy, blame, covert hostility, despair, dying, fear, grief, hate, hiding, hopeless, hostility, no sympathy, pity, propitiation, regret, resentment, self-abasement, shame, sympathy, terror, total failure, unexpressed resentment, useless, victim.2
I can think of some other feelings that could be considered as “discomfort” as well, such as bitterness, condemnation, condescension, depression, embarrassment, envy, exasperation, frustration, humiliation, impatience, indecision, indignation, intolerance, jealousy, mistrust, reproach, revenge, sadness, sarcasm, spite, worrying.
But we can make this very simple by saying “discomfort” is anything you feel that is less than total excitement, joy, and enthusiasm.
Whenever we feel one of these emotions, or physical pain, the first thing we do is judge it to be “wrong” or “bad” or “undesirable” – something we don’t want to feel. Then we resist it. Then we assign power “out there” to the person, place, or thing that made us feel less than totally joyful. “He,” “she”, or “it” caused me to feel this way, whether it’s an emotional upset or an upset stomach. In other words, we “blame” whatever is “out there” that “did this to me.” Then we try to change, fix, or improve that situation somehow.
Even those of us who have believed for years “you create your own reality” do this, whether we like to admit it or not, or whether we might think we’re too “enlightened” for that. We do it anyway, in greater or lesser ways, if we’re really honest with ourselves; and rightfully so, because it’s an intrinsic part of the first half of the Human Game which we played for so long and which led into more limitation.
In the cocoon you’re going to have similar experiences to those from the first half of the Game. Basically, you’re going to find yourself immersed in movies with people, places, and things that make you feel “discomfort” from time to time. Some of the people you encounter, for example, might piss you off the same way they did the first time you met them – or the second time, or the umpteenth time.
Rest assured this is not a hologram created by your Infinite I in order to create more limitation in your life. This hologram is a gift to you from your Infinite I, showing you exactly where you assigned power in the past to something “out there,” and, most importantly, where that power still resides. It is your chance to respond differently to this hologram – to, in a sense, “reclaim” the power you gave away and rewrite the ending to this storyline.
Whenever you feel this discomfort – whenever you have the slightest thought you wish something “out there” in your present experience would change – Robert says to run his Process; so let’s take a little closer look at it. (Again, Robert may or may not agree fully with some of my extended explanations.)
1. Remind yourself it isn’t real. Remember that you are immersed in a hologram, and by definition a hologram is not real. You only make it real if you assign it the power to be real and give it control over you.
2. Dive right smack into the middle of it. This is the opposite of what we normally did in the first half of the Human Game. Whenever we would meet something “out there” that made us uncomfortable – pain and suffering, for example – we would try to get away from it, resist it, suppress it, change it, ignore it, drug it, deny it, hide from it, escape it, or otherwise make it go away. Robert says, on the other hand, to embrace it fully, to see it in all its glory, to invite it closer and get yourself into the middle of it as completely as possible.
3. Feel the “discomfort energy” fully. Rather than rushing through the Process as soon as you feel the least little discomfort, let it build as much as possible.
There’s a very simple reason for this. What we want to do next, according to Robert, is “reclaim the power” we assigned “out there” in these holograms. In many cases, we have “given” a lot of power away to certain people, places, and things that resulted in our feeling less than joyful. In fact, it may take more than one experience in the second half of the Human Game to switch off that power flow; and the more we can get at one time, the faster and easier the process will be to “reclaim” it all. Therefore let the discomfort grow as much as possible to process as much as you can at one time; and then be prepared to do it again later, either with the same person, place, or thing, or a similar situation, until all the power you have placed “out there” has been turned off.
(There are some workable techniques you might want to use to help the discomfort build, like “Focusing” developed by Dr. Eugene Gendlin.3)
4. When it reaches a peak, call it what it is and tell the truth about it. When the discomfort has become as much as you can stand at that moment, it’s time to honestly assess the situation and look for your judgments, beliefs, and opinions. For example, is there someone or something in this experience you think is “wrong” or “bad” and should change or be different than it is? Who or what, specifically? And is that true?
Is there a belief you hold causing the discomfort? Exactly what is it? And is it true?
Did you form an opinion that is now causing you discomfort in this experience? What is it, and is it really true?
(It can help a lot to actually write these things down as you go through the Process, at least in the beginning.)
One of the things you don’t ask is “Why” this experience is happening to you. That’s a distraction that has no relevance and will keep you from focusing on what does matter. Asking “Why” is what everyone does inside the movie theater, because it leads into more and more limitation; but inside the cocoon it’s a useless concept. Maybe you will understand “Why,” and maybe not; it doesn’t matter.
As the experiences in your cocoon continue, you might start to see patterns in your life that revolve around certain key judgments and beliefs and opinions. You can expect to have similar holograms appear that give you the opportunity to follow those patterns, perhaps back to the first time you formed that judgment, or adopted that belief, or created that opinion.
So “calling it what it is” means acknowledging and owning up to the fact that your discomfort is based on the judgments, beliefs, and opinions you formed as a reaction or response to this situation.
The “truth about it” is that no one and nothing “out there” is going to change to make you happier. You’re the one who’s going to have to change your reactions and responses to your experiences; you’re the one who’s going to have to take 100% responsibility for how you feel and your condition in life; you’re the one who jumped into this uncomfortable hole, rather than being pushed or forced or tricked into it.
The “truth about it” is that no one can ever be a victim of anyone or anything at any time in any experience; likewise, there are no unwanted perpetrators. As long as you feel like you’re a victim, you have assigned power “out there” that isn’t real.
The “truth about it” is that you have no power to change the experience or anyone or anything “out there.” The only power you have as a Player is using your free will to change the way you react and respond to the holographic experiences created for you by your Infinite I.
5. Reclaim your power from the creation. “Reclaim” is Robert’s word, and I think it can be a little misleading. A Player has no power; we didn’t create the hologram to begin with. We definitely made the hologram real by assigning it power, but the power we assigned was as imaginary as the hologram itself.
“Reclaiming your power” also suggests that when you have finished with the Process, you will have more power than before you started, by taking the power back you had assigned to the hologram “out there.” This is also not true.
What I prefer to say is that you disconnect or turn off the power you assigned to the hologram, like pulling the plug or turning off a light switch. It was your judgments, beliefs, and opinions that provided the power in the first place. Think of it this way…
In the first half of the Human Game, you entered a holographic experience and flipped a switch that lit it up and made it appear real. It’s still there, fully illuminated, when you re-visit it in the second half – which is helpful, because you need it as bright as possible to clearly see the judgments, beliefs, and opinions that were your reactions and responses, and which became part of your false self, the personality construct, the ego you have been thinking is you.
When you have finished processing that hologram, you simply unplug the power source or turn the light switch off. In the beginning, it helped to visualize myself doing that.
(If there are still judgments, beliefs, and opinions associated with that holographic experience – in other words, you didn’t get them all the first time – the light won’t go off completely and your Infinite I will give you another opportunity later to run the Process on the same or similar circumstances again.)
6. Express appreciation. Expressing appreciation is perhaps the most important step. Even if you don’t “like” the experience you are having, do whatever possible (“fake it until you make it”) to express appreciation to your Infinite I for the experience – and especially thanks and appreciation to the person, place, or thing that was causing you the discomfort. After all, your Infinite I has just given you the gift of showing you where you assigned power “out there” in the past, and that’s worthy of some appreciation; and the people, places, or things that caused your discomfort have given you the gift of expertly playing a role in your holographic movie to assist you in your process of becoming a butterfly – definitely worthy of appreciation.
I realize this may be difficult in the beginning; but in fact, you may soon be wanting other people, places, or things who make you feel less than totally joyful to show up in your holograms as much and as often as they can, just so you can see where you've assigned power "out there" and "reclaim" it. (For a more complete discussion of “other people” in your holographic experiences and the roles they play, please see Chapter Twenty-Three, “Other People,” in Part Three of this book.)
If you keep doing this Process, you will eventually come to sincerely and completely appreciate each and every experience you have had, and all the people, places and things in it for the absolute perfection they represent.
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Remember what you’re seeing “out there” causing you discomfort is just a total immersion movie. If you went to a play one night and were moved to tears by an emotional scene – let’s say a woman who was dying of cancer, à la Love Story – you wouldn’t blame the writer or director or the actors for making you feel bad. That’s why you went to the play in the first place, to have an “inner experience” from the “outer experience.”
If you then went to the café next door after the play and saw the actress who played the part of the dying woman, I doubt you’d blame her for causing your discomfort, or consider yourself a victim of her performance, or ask her to change the way she plays her part. To the contrary, you’d probably praise her for doing such a good job to elicit your emotional response.
That’s what Robert’s Process is all about… recognizing we are immersed in an amazing 3D holographic movie in order to have an “inner experience” from the “outer experience,” that our Infinite I is writing and directing every scene of that movie down to the smallest detail, that there are actors playing their roles in our movies to which we are reacting and responding, that any discomfort we feel is based solely on our reactions and responses and the power we assigned “out there” to the movie, that the only power we have is to change our reactions and responses if we are not happy with them, and then express our appreciation to the writer, director, and actors who did their job so well to show us the true source of our discomfort and give us the opportunity to write a new ending for ourselves.
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I found Robert’s Process easy to do and very effective for the first little while inside my cocoon, and I recommend it (as I have explained it above) for all Players new to their cocoon. At least it gets you started and produces some beneficial results in letting go of judgments, beliefs, and opinions.
In this chapter and the next, I want to give you a couple examples in some detail from my own life that might be helpful in better understanding this Process. This first example contains virtually all of the elements I’ve just been discussing….
I had been in my cocoon about six months and I was living with two-hundred good friends in an intentional community in southern Portugal called Tamera. One of my jobs for the community was running an evening café, which I totally enjoyed. It was a chance to see many friends from the community I wouldn’t normally meet during the day, who would come to the café at night to relax and have fun. I loved creating a special atmosphere and energy for them, and serving them and treating them with popcorn and great music.
This café was a source of pride and pleasure for me, and I treasured it and protected it, which is why on this one particular evening I got very upset.
There was one member of the community, I’ll call her Betty, whom I had known for fifteen years, ever since the community of ZEGG in Germany. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Betty; I hardly gave her a thought. But I didn’t enjoy her company, and I honestly don’t know anyone who did. She seemed to always have this sour and angry and arrogant attitude that was simply not fun to be around. For some reason the community never kicked anyone out – at least not for being sour and angry and arrogant – so she was still there after fifteen years. Fortunately, I didn’t have to see her a lot.
However, on this particular night of my café, Betty suddenly drove her car onto the same gravel lot where I ran my café and parked it. Granted, the car was off to one side somewhat, so it didn’t really bother my guests; but it was ugly sitting there, ruining the ambiance I worked so hard to create. Besides, there was a rule against parking cars in that location.
My first reaction was to assume Betty had just parked there temporarily since her room was close by and perhaps she had to unload something and would be back soon to move her car. But when ten minutes went by and the car was still there, getting uglier by the second and infecting the entire atmosphere, I went to her room to make sure she would move it. My very polite request was met with an antagonistic, “Mind your own business!”
I was beginning to feel more and more “uncomfortable.” “Pissed” is the better word. I let another ten minutes go by and, when she hadn’t moved the car, went back to her room and ordered her with all the authority I could muster to park it where it belonged. She was in the middle of an angry diatribe about “Who was I to tell her what to do” when I turned and walked away.
She never did move the car. It sat there the entire night poisoning my carefully orchestrated café ambiance. I was too busy at the time serving drinks and popcorn to have the time and space I needed to run the Process, but I couldn’t let myself look at the car or think about Betty or I would get seriously angry.
As “luck” would have it, that particular night a female guest in the community fell and broke her leg, and we had to call an ambulance. The way Betty’s car was parked was blocking one of the main dirt roads the ambulance could use to get to the injured guest, so my indignation at her refusal to move it suddenly gained legitimacy. It was no longer just my personal desire to have the car gone from my beloved café; it was now interfering with a serious medical emergency, which is one of the reasons why there was a rule against parking there.
So I went back to Betty’s room and told her to move her car one more time before the ambulance arrived. She didn’t. That was Betty. (The ambulance eventually found another route to get to the injured patient.)
The next morning I allowed myself to let the discomfort – the anger I felt – come back up. I wanted to make Betty “wrong.” I blamed her for ruining one of my greatest pleasures at the time, my café night. I knew if she would only change what she was doing, I would be a lot happier.
So I began running Robert’s Process, or at least my version of it, and I reminded myself that the discomfort was a red flag pointing to where I had assigned power to this hologram to make it seem real; and I let the discomfort build and build inside me until I was feeling it full force.
I had long since stopped asking “Why” this had happened. I knew “Why,” or I knew the only reason that counted for anything: My Infinite I was trying to help me by showing me something. So I didn’t waste time speculating about the reason I had this experience.
Instead I reminded myself none of it was real, that this was a holographic experience created specifically for me by my Infinite I as a gift on my path toward self-realization. I had done this enough by this time that it only took five seconds before I knew with certainty this was true. I just didn’t know what was inside the gift wrapping yet.
I admitted to myself I felt like a victim, that I believed Betty had interfered with the pleasure I got from my café, and that I was judging Betty for being “wrong” for what she had done. I even had a great justification for my judgment in the form an ambulance that needed the right of way. In fact, I could have found a lot of support from other members of the community about how “right” I was and how “wrong” Betty was.
But that road leads nowhere.
Instead I decided to let go of all my judgments and stop blaming Betty, recognizing instead she was simply reading a movie script my Infinite I had written for me. This had nothing to do with her and everything to do with me. Betty’s behavior was not “wrong” at all; in fact, she had performed her part in my movie with great expertise. How could I possibly blame her for that?
I also realized I believed she should follow the rules and that it was my place to make her do that; and my opinion was that she didn’t even belong in this community, much less in my hologram! My anger then extended to the whole community for not kicking her out sooner.
The “truth of it” was that I had given Betty the power to ruin the total joy I got from running my café, and it had been my reaction and response to Betty that created my discomfort, not anything Betty did or said. More importantly, they were reactions and responses I had full control over through my own free will and could change in an instant.
So I consciously “reclaimed” all the power I had given to Betty and to the incident itself to make it real; or at least that’s the way Scheinfeld would say it. As I said earlier, I think in terms of turning off the power source to the hologram, of flipping the switch.
By the time I had done all this, and it only took a few minutes, all my discomfort was gone, and I was feeling enormous appreciation to my Infinite I for the experience – thankful for the opportunity to see where I had formed judgments, beliefs and opinions I no longer wanted to hold.
But more importantly, I was deeply and sincerely appreciative to Betty for having played her part so well, for having been willing to accept that role in my holographic experience, and for not giving in to my “authority” but playing the scene out in its entirety. In fact, I was feeling such appreciation that I wanted to go to Betty and hug her and thank her and ask her, please, to continue playing these kinds of parts in my movies so I could uncover other places where I may have judged and blamed and given away my power.
(In the end I didn’t actually go to Betty and hug and thank her. How do you say to someone, “You did such a great performance in my movie last night. Thank you, sincerely, and please continue being the sour and angry and arrogant character you’re playing so I can see if there are other situations like that where I have assigned power and made real.” I don’t think she would have understood.)
After this process, Betty never parked her car there again, although I never asked her not to; and I no longer had any discomfort being in her presence. But here’s a warning: You cannot run this Process with the hope or expectation that by doing so, your experience will change. In other words, you can’t lie to yourself and fool your Infinite I by letting go of your judgments and expressing your appreciation scheming that if you do, someone or something “out there” will change. It doesn’t work that way, and the someone or something “out there” won’t change. Your Infinite I will keep creating experiences to show you where you assigned power and left it there until you honestly and completely accept the experience for exactly what it is and your role in it. In other words, someone or something “out there” can only change when you no longer need or want anything in that holographic experience to be any different than it is; and then it doesn’t matter to you whether it changes or not!
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Before we leave this chapter, let me be very clear about one thing: This process is not about forgiveness, as wonderful and spiritual as most people consider that to be. It was not about me forgiving Betty; and you are not trying to get to the point of being able to forgive someone for what they did. In most cases, forgiveness implies a judgment still exists that a person did something “wrong” for which you are forgiving them. If that’s all the farther you get, you haven’t finished the process.
On the other hand, A Course in Miracles says, ““Forgiveness recognizes what you thought your brother did to you has not occurred. It does not pardon sins and make them real. It sees there was no sin.”4
That’s their definition of forgiveness, and a most accurate one, if everyone could understand it that way. To put it simply, when you recognize the other person never did anything to you at all for which they need to be forgiven, you will be on your way; and when you actually arrive at the point of sincerely and enthusiastically expressing your appreciation to them for what they did – for the role they played so well in your hologram – you will have arrived.