Vertical Growth—Horizontal Distraction

True growth is vertical.  A rare few soar to new heights of self-awareness, as they dig deep into themselves to heal repressed trauma and liberate buried magnificence.  This profound dialogue between depth and height is the way new consciousness grows.  These rare few use love and work to evolve life to the next level of awareness and meaning.

Most people, the unconscious masses, mistakenly call horizontal development—growth.  Love and work serve selfish, violent ends that are unsustainable and destructive of life.  This is the norm.

Horizontal Distraction—the Unconscious Masses

Examples of the misuse of love:

• the average embrace self-deception and avoid the self-love which leads to self-knowing and self-understanding. The norm fears the inner world and its responsibilities, which would cast them out of their destructive families and conforming culture and onto a lonely path of self-discovery.

• the average equate self-love with self-indulgence, appeasing the child’s historical unmet needs with countless diversions that include all addictive practices.

• the average misuse having children and childrearing as a lifelong diversion. Parents live through their children, projecting their unfulfilled dreams and their repressed rage onto the child.  Having children is the opiate of the masses, distracting them from their inner world.  This has generated an overpopulated, needy and violent outer world.

• the average misuse relationships and marriage to avoid inner investigation. The partner is the focus of rescue and disappointment.  External hopes and conflicts are a diversion, replacing an inner identity.

• the average do not love the natural world, but misuse nature as a resource to exploit and a dump for garbage and other pollutants, decimating the environment. On a poisoned earth, the unconscious masses think they’re above nature, as they mindlessly court their extinction.

Examples of the misuse of work:

• the average use grandiose jobs to increase income, social status and the prestige of the false self, as they shun their inner world. Both repressed trauma and inner magnificence remain unhealed, unliberated, since a healed psyche and expressive soul would threaten deadening conformity, necessary to belong to unconscious families and to succeed in a fake world.

• the average use jobs that have no meaning at all and the external structure of the workweek to give their lives shape and to shield them from their inner world. A mind-numbing routine offers only a paycheck to pay bills, quelling personal growth and creative impulse that would threaten conforming to the status quo.

• the average use compulsive consumption of goods to fill an inner void. Consumerism distracts them from an emptiness that is never questioned or even acknowledged.  The rapacious consumerism of the average fosters short-term economic growth—and long-term decimation of the natural world.

• the average need war—personal, local and global—as a way to project repressed anger outward onto the other. As they pick sides on polarizing issues, they avoid the real issue, indicting the crimes of their parents and ancestors, which remain buried within.  Violence destroys the safety necessary to do inner work.

Vertical growth—the Rare Few

In vertical growth, love and work explore life’s true meaning and expand consciousness.

Love:

• the rare few use love to serve the development of self and others. Human nature becomes the best part of nature.

• the rare few use sex as a source of creative energy and genuine warmth, leading to authentic attachment to others, often at a spiritual level.  Actual sex has less appeal.

• the rare few use relationships to enhance the soul-growth of both partners. True love comes from the true self of each.

• the rare few use love not to have more children in an overpopulated, troubled world, but to birth the inner child and foster the development of the true self.

Work:

• the rare few see that the true work in life is to dismantle childhood trauma and liberate inner magnificence. Then, the unique gifts of the individual can serve personal growth and the growth of others and can further the expansion of consciousness, which will also preserve the natural world.

Conclusion

You may not get social approval for your vertical quest—defying unconscious living—but truth and nature will rejoice and sustain you.