Is your life more reactive or creative?
Most people have an unconscious, reactive identity - an ego (sense of self) formed as a reaction to everything that has ever happened to them.
We think "I am that", when really "that" is a generalized story of the reactions we've had to what's happened to us up until now. We identify with our careers, "I am a banker", our emotions, "I am anxious", our roles, "I am a dad", and our wounds, "I am damaged". Whether historically accurate or not, some of these identities are useful in that they organize the way we perceive, experience, think, feel, and act in a manner that suits us, but more often than not most of these identities are crippling "self-fulfilling prophecies" at their worst.
What most of us don't realize is that all these identities are malleable and optional - for better and for worse.
In my upcoming book, we will discover (among many other practical tools for healing and thriving) exactly how to construct a useful, beneficial, Conscious, "Creative I AM". An Aware-Will that is uniquely tailored to organize our perception, experience, thoughts, feelings, and actions around our adult values and choices, free from subversive conditioning from our past, our parents, the government, advertising, the Joneses, trauma, etc.
Identities formed as re-actions are an aspect of our mechanical evolution and give rise to the "same old-same old" sense we get about the monotony of our day-to-day lives. Plants and animals are also "mechanical" in their evolutionary adaptations in that they are entirely dependent on the outer environment and what happens to them - if that changes enough so too will their entire species either change or go extinct. We also have an animal aspect that evolves this way. Many of our personalities, which filter and drive the way we experience the world, are largely dictated by what happens to us more than by our values and choices.
However, human beings also have the capacity for Conscious Evolution that most people don’t ever tap into because we are too busy reacting to what life throws at us, we don't notice that we can, or learn how to consciously evolve. Mechanical evolution is by definition unconscious and re-active. But conscious evolution can only be the result of conscious, creative acts, as in: performed on purpose, in a deliberate way, set aside for that particular end: Conscious Evolution.
When we understand all the layers of implications - Body, Mind, and Spirit - this difference between re-active and Creative, between mechanical and conscious evolution - amounts to ALL the difference between a life characterized more by distress and upset, versus one characterized by Joy, Openness, Love, Kindness, Awareness, Gratitude, Presence and Surrender (“The JOLKA-GPS”).
As we will go into in much more detail in the book, The 33-day Power Play, the Future-Now Mastermind, and future premium blog content, the mechanically reactive sense of self is tied into the default mode network of our brain. As such, its main priority - from an evolutionary perspective - is survival. While this survival priority has many adaptive advantages, it can be quite problematic from a quality of life standpoint because when we are living our life mechanically and reactively our free will is coopted and dictated by the brain's "negativity bias."
The default mode negativity bias we are all born with compels us to perceive, experience, think, feel, and act under the assumption of threat - it is better to assume the stick is a snake than the snake is a stick. This "primes" our brain to filter life through the distressing emotions associated with fight (anger, frustration, impatience, criticism, control), flight (fear, anxiety, worry, insecurity, doubt), and freeze (apathy, helplessness, hopelessness, numbness, depression). In ways I can't explain further in this piece, I contend that the "cultural trance" of the default mode negativity bias is the basis of all human suffering, violence, and disease.
Plus, when you think about it, if our very sense of who we are is defined by our reactions to what has happened to us, then we by definition are “victims of circumstance.” If, instead however, aside from anything that has ever happened to us, we organize ourselves around a conglomerate of values that we prioritize, we are “FREE” to think, feel, act, and experience as we CHOOSE instead of how we are compelled.
