Many of us know we need to change, but how do we do it? Spiritual teacher and intuitive counselor Beth Maynard Green offers a thorough, compassionate, and practical guide to personal and collective transformation. This step-by-step handbook gives solutions for overcoming ego domination, becoming happier and more relaxed, and achieving higher consciousness. It blends new and old wisdom in ways that are fresh yet familiar. In Section 1 of Living with Reality, Maynard Green shares original insights into who we are and includes the genesis of the ego, the development of our personalities from birth, the roles of fear and pain, and the causes of addiction. Section 2 provides a program for change and discusses ¿ challenging yet commonsense paradigms ¿ clear explanations of our habitual behavior patterns and ways to break them ¿ practices that make us more relaxed, happy, and supportive to our world ¿ self-help exercises, including detailed questions for self-reflection ¿ techniques to access higher consciousness Practical and powerful, Living with Reality is a manual for living and a vehicle for both group and individual study and transformation. Read it! Live it!

Living with Reality

Who We Are, What We Could Be, How We Get ThereBy Beth Maynard Green

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Beth Maynard Green
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-5654-4

Contents

Preface: Who We Are & What We Could Be...........................................................................xviiAcknowledgements.................................................................................................xxiIntroduction: Ego, Instinct & Evolution: Are We Ready to Change?.................................................1Living with Reality..............................................................................................37Section I—The Human Condition Who We Are...................................................................39Chapter 1. What Is Reality, And Why Is It So Hard to Live With?..................................................41Chapter 2. The Human Condition: The Pain & Fear that Drive Us....................................................59Chapter 3. The Fear and Pain of Disconnection....................................................................65Chapter 4. Changing Our State Addictions & Fantasy...............................................................86Chapter 5. Who We Are & What We Could Be.........................................................................96Chapter 6. How to Get There – Learning to Live with Reality: An Outline of Our Program.....................98Section II—The Platforms – What We Could Be & How to Get There.......................................103A Few Reminders Before We Start..................................................................................105Part 1. Partnering with Others: The First Four Platforms.........................................................107Platform One: Becoming Oneness – The Essence of Who We Are.................................................109Platform Two: Becoming Differentiated – Individuation in the Context of Oneness............................164Platform Three: Becoming Co-Creative – How We Relate to the Universe.......................................205Platform Four: Becoming Mutually Supportive – Living Oneness...............................................245Part 2. Partnering with Ourselves – The Second Three Platforms.............................................299A Few Comments to Introduce Our Next Section.....................................................................301Platform Five: Becoming Self-Aware – The First Step toward Self-Mastery....................................303Platform Six: Becoming Integrated – Gaining More Command Over Ourselves....................................391Platform Seven: Becoming Accountable – Awareness, Amends and Transformation................................429Part 3. Partnering with the Process of Living: The Final Two Platforms...........................................513A Few Comments to Introduce Our Next Section.....................................................................515Platform Eight: Becoming Not-Knowing – Becoming Available to Higher Consciousness..........................517Platform Nine: Becoming Becoming – Relaxing into the Process of Living.....................................568Epilogue: Where We Have Come.....................................................................................619Appendix A: List of Tools........................................................................................623Appendix B: Letter from The Stream August 2011...................................................................635About Beth Maynard Green.........................................................................................643

Chapter One

What Is Reality, And Why Is It So Hard to Live With?

Reality is what is—what we see and what we don't see. It is objective. It is not an illusion. There is a spectrum of colors, whether we can see them or not. The tree falls in the forest, whether we hear it or not. The climate is changing, whether we acknowledge it or not. And people are driven by inner drives and demons, whether they are aware of them or not.

In addition, there is another realm of reality that most people cannot see or even sense or measure. While many refer to that reality as the spiritual realm, it is no more or less spiritual than the color blue. This reality is the spectrum of vibrational energies that have not yet been measured, but which impact matter and can alter our emotional state. For those of us who have worked with these realms, they are as real as peanut butter.

All this seems relatively simple and straightforward. Reality exists. Let's expand our understanding of it. Let's live with it. If this is so straightforward, why do I need to devote an entire book to the topic? Because we don't see or don't want to deal with reality, and there are several reasons why.

1. Our perceptions are limited, individually and collectively, to what we can see.

2. We each live in our own subjective world.

3. Our egos have designed behaviors to cope with our subjective experience.

4. Reality gets in the way of our wants, desires and plans.

Let's look at these one at a time.

OUR PERCEPTIONS ARE LIMITED, INDIVIDUALLY AND COLLECTIVELY, TO WHAT WE CAN SEE

Our perceptions are limited by at least four factors:

• Our built-in physical capacities

• The limitations of the instruments we have designed to go beyond our own capacities

• Our willingness to see

• The partialness of our perspective

Our Built-In Physical Capacities

Let's look at light waves, as an example. With the naked eye, we can see only a certain spectrum of color because of the limitations of our physical capacities. But today we are well aware that there are infrared and ultraviolet rays that we can't perceive with our eyes, but which have an effect on us. When we look at a person, we can't see his or her genes, but much of that person's life has been influenced, if not pre-determined, by his or her genetic makeup, something we can't see with our unassisted eyes.

While our senses cannot see everything, we can often detect the effect of things that we cannot directly perceive. For example, long before we started understanding heredity, people would comment that, "The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree." We noticed similarities within families, though we couldn't distinguish between characteristics that were inherited and those that were caused by environmental influences. To a large degree, we still can't. We saw the effect of gravity long before we could measure it. And, speaking of apples, we knew the apple would fall from the tree long before we knew why.

We have become used to the idea that there's much in the material world that we cannot see and that we need instruments or theories to begin to grapple with them. We are also beginning to realize that people, too, have motivations of which we may not be aware. You meet Mary. She's wearing a blue dress. Why? You think she's wearing the dress because she likes it, if you think about it at all. You have no idea of her unseen motivations. For example, maybe Mary feels insecure and misses her mom. Her mother loved blue, and wearing the dress reminds Mary of her. Or maybe Mary thinks George will like the dress and be attracted to her. Or maybe she doesn't feel feminine and hopes that a dress will change the way...