Tag Archives: motivation

The Gentle Art of Getting a Life

Posted on by

By George A. Boyd © 2022

Aspirants who learn to live in an altered state of consciousness in religious or spiritual cults often withdraw from their lives. For them to recover, they have to re-own their lives.

The embodied ego, which is an aspect of what we call Life Consciousness, consists of the following layers:

  1. Behavior – These are the actions you do.
  2. Assumed identity – These are the roles or functions you perform that drive your behavior.
  3. Motivation – These are the desires or dreams that underlie your behavior and drive you to inhabit the different roles you play in your life.
  4. Beliefs – These are the reasons you give about why you pursue your desires or dreams.
  5. Meaning and purpose – This is the core meta-motivation that animates your dreams and desires—this is the reason you tell yourself you are alive. [For some, this might be to take care of their family. For others, it might be to serve their country in the military. For others, it might be the expression of their creative gifts. For others, it might be to pursue a spiritual Path.]
  6. Decision – This is the choice to enact your dreams and pursue your worthy desires.
  7. Core identity – At this level, you discover the embodied ego, which is the actor in your life. Uniting your attention with this center grants the perception of where you are in your life right now.

Here are some examples of these life layers:

You normally do not perform random behavior, or act upon a whim: you perform actions for a reason. For example, you take out the trash, because you don’t want to attract insects or rodents. You brush your hair before going out of the house, because you want to present a good appearance when you leave your home.

You subsume a group of associated behavior under the rubric of a role you assume. The role, “I am a homeowner,” contains sets of related behavior. This might include cleaning, repair, and maintenance of your home; paying bills and taxes for your home; and selecting furniture, appliances, and design elements to furnish and beautify your home.

Something motivates you to want to own a home and take care of it. There are motivations that underlie each of your roles.

You tell yourself a story as to why you want to own a home: this is the layer of beliefs.

Underlying these stories you tell yourself as to why you are motivated to pursue the objectives you consider important, there is a core element of meta-motivation—the purpose why you are alive. [When people don’t discover this for themselves, political and religious leaders, spiritual cults, hate and terrorist groups are only to happy to tell you what your purpose is, so you can follow them and serve their agendas.]

Your life is founded upon the decisions and choices your make. This determines the direction your life takes. [When you own your choices, you are capable of being responsible and accountable.]

The core identity of the ego perceives the results your choices have made in your life, and judges whether you are successful and happy—you have achieved what you have desired—or you are a miserable failure, because you have not achieved what you want or been able to define and act upon what gives your life meaning. This core ego identity has been called your self-image.

The art of re-owing your life

When your attention is fixed in an altered state of consciousness, you dissociate from your life experience. Dissociation leads to:

  • Not feeling your feelings (emotional numbness or deadness)
  • A sense your life is not real (depersonalization)
  • A perception that the world is not real (derealization)
  • A loss of desire for personal objectives (demotivation)
  • A belief that your identity and your life no longer exist (ego death)

In order to restore normalized functioning, you need to bring your attention, awareness, and energy out of the altered state of consciousness and return them to the fully grounded state—what we call the waking state of awareness. Some ways you can do this are:

  • Bring your attention back to the waking state of consciousness and keep it there until your awareness returns to this state.
  • Visualize the energy that is fixing you in an altered state of consciousness is moving down a tube, and is becoming fixed in the center of the earth.
  • Do activities that activate the centers of the Conscious mind, such as walking and exercise; paying attention to your immediate sensory experience of the environment; relating to others as human beings, not a spiritual essence; solving problems that require analytical thinking; performing an inventory of your life’s goals and defining your purpose for being alive.

When you function in the Conscious mind, your ego’s integration re-emerges, and you regain the sense of having a unique human life. Getting your attention, awareness, and energy back to the ego and the Conscious mind can help you restore normalized functioning and again experience that you have a life.

These dissociative states are commonly experienced during Kundalini syndromes and after sustained periods of deep meditation. You will also find them in groups that admonish their followers to demonize their personality and their ego, casting them as illusory (Maya), as an agency of the evil world mind (the Matrix), or as the embodiment of evil (the carnal man, the man of sin, or the spawn of Satan)—and urge them to remain in an altered state of awareness.

We have written in greater depth on the consequences of remaining in altered states of awareness in our book, Religions, Cults, and Terrorism: What the Heck Are We Doing? Those who are struggling with the aftermath of being involved for an extended time in a religious cult—or other group that has kept you in a altered state of consciousness for a sustained period—may find our Cult Recovery Coaching Program helpful.

Exploring the Motivational Spectrum

Posted on by

By George A. Boyd © 2021

Have you ever noticed that people approach their activities with different levels of willingness to engage in them? Here are some examples of different motivational mindsets:

  1. Enthusiastic embrace of an activity – you do it joyfully and freely; you look forward to doing the activity.
  2. Encountering difficulty – you may have an initial enthusiasm for the activity, but you experience disappointment in your results from doing the activity—you discover you are not very good at the activity. You may become self-critical, wary and vigilant that others may criticize you or make fun of you. You may try to find out why you encounter these difficulties and try to improve them.
  3. Trepidation – You have reticence to begin and continue an activity. You may not trust your performance or your ability, and you may do it with some anxiety or fear that you will fail or that you may risk hurting yourself.
  4. Avoidance – You have a resistance to do an activity. You find excuses for not doing it. You procrastinate in starting it. You may sabotage your efforts so people won’t trust you to do activity correctly.
  5. Defiance – You stubbornly and defiantly refuse to do the activity. You cannot be persuaded to consent to participate in the action.
  6. Capitulation – You do the activity only because you are coerced, threatened, or intimidated to do the action. You may have genuine dislike for the activity, but you feel you must do it, or you genuinely face negative consequences: violence, abuse, punishment, incarceration, or death.
  7. Surrender – You carry out in response to an inner command or direction you receive from your Soul, from your spiritual Master, or the Divine. You carry out the activity as your duty in service to your Soul or God, in spite of your personal feelings or the opinions of other people.

You may wish to examine which of your current activities fall into each of these categories. You could do a brief inventory to see what activities your truly enjoy and love to do, and those that being up stress and conflict.

The Role of Desire in Motivation

Positive motivation is founded upon desire: you want to do something. Negative motivation is founded upon aversion: you don’t want to do something, but there are consequences for failing to do the action.

People cope with their desires in different ways, depending on whether they can satisfy them directly, whether they are attainable, whether they or other people approve or forbid them, or whether they are attempting to relinquish desires to achieve a state of spiritual transcendence or enlightenment.

You may wish to notice what you desire, and which of the following strategies you are using to fulfill, suppress, or transcend your desires:

  1. Direct action – You have a desire: you act on the desire. No deeper aspect of your psyche or a “Higher Power” hinders you from taking direct action. You bear the full responsibility for the consequences.
  2. Fantasy – You cannot act on your desire due to your circumstances. You may fantasize about achieving what you desire. You may feel envy or jealousy for those who are able to enjoy the desire, but you can’t. You may feel something is wrong with you, because you can’t have what you want, when others can have it. You may engage in a symbolic or substitute activity to vicariously enact the desire. For example, someone might resort to masturbation instead of having a regular sexual partner. In this strategy, you feel frustration and unhappiness.
  3. Taboo – Your conscience forbids you from enacting certain activity. Alternately, those around you may forbid the activity. You may attempt to indulge in the activity secretly. This inner conflict may make you split your perception of yourself into a good, obedient self and a bad, defiant self. You may find that part of your psyche aligns with your values of goodness, truth, and righteousness; part aligns with rebellion and to the sense of entitlement to do forbidden things. Your conscience may criticize, argue with, and punish your bad side; your bad side may feel it is persecuted or under attack, and may redouble its defense of what it desires and its right to have it.
  4. Dissociation – In this strategy, you enter an altered state of consciousness through prayer, meditation, or hypnosis, and identify with a spiritual essence. While you are in this altered state of consciousness, your bad side’s activities may be temporarily suspended. You may disidentify with your ego and your personality, and re-identify with this spiritual essence—you may distance yourself from your former behavior through regarding the part of you that did bad behavior in the past as your sinful self, but now you have abandoned that sinful self, because you have been saved and reborn.

If you remain in these altered states of consciousness for extended periods of time, you may experience dissociation, where you can no longer feel your authentic feelings; depersonalization, where your life no longer seems real; or de-motivation, where your personal desires no longer seem worthwhile pursuing anymore. Instead of acting on your desires, you may instead enact a prescribed lifestyle. If your authentic desires emerge, you may attempt to meditate or pray them away.

  1. Decompensation – At this stage, you experience vivid hallucinations and projection of your repressed desires as intrapsychic demons and devils, which appear to attack you. You are engaged in a pitched inner battle to overcome these resurgences of your desires, which appear to personify in the depths of your mind. It may be difficult at this stage to identify these demons and devils as your own desires, because you have disowned them. Instead, these personifications appear to be part of a universal force of evil—Kal or Satan. Some people may adopt severe austerities at this stage to attempt to suppress this evil they see within them. Some people become psychotic at this stage.
  2. Monastic surrender – You surrender your desire for wealth, sex and sensual pleasure, and to pursue your personal dreams or desires. You may take a monastic vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience. You live a life according to the dictates of the scriptures of your faith at this stage; you may belong to a monastic community. You may engage in isolation to avoid temptations; you may become a hermit or holy wanderer. You spend you day in prayer, contemplation, and meditation. In some religious communities, you may carry out service or ministry. You submit yourself to the guidance of a spiritual mentor, who gives you regular guidance and direction for what you must do.
  3. Agya – Your life, desires, mind, and will are completely surrendered to the Will Divine. You enact this Divine direction in your daily life. Those who become Gurus, Prophets, and spiritual Masters operate from this platform. When you function from this level, you allow yourself to become the instrument for Divine Light, Grace, Love, and Wisdom to express through you. This inner Divinity fully overshadows and controls your life.

You may wish to examine which of these strategies you are using to avoid fulfilling your desires; through psychotherapy and coaching you can sometimes free yourself to embrace your natural desires and let go of the self-torment of strategies two and three—fantasy and taboo.

Those of you who are trying to avoid your desires through strategy four, dissociation—and you have gotten involved in a religious or political cult—can often benefit from a structured program such as our Cult Recovery Coaching Program, which can walk you through the steps to re-own your life, your sanity, and your genuine desires.

Those of you who have moved onto the platform of decompensation—strategy five—may frankly not be reachable though psychotherapy, coaching, or spiritual intervention. If you are functioning at this level, your challenge is to determine whether you seek to dedicate your life completely to God, in which case, you may opt for the wraparound support of a monastic community, or whether you will embrace your authentic human life and its desires again, and come back down to earth.

It may be valuable to determine which of your desires could be satisfied through direct action, and which legitimately need to be deferred—or outright jettisoned; for not every desire of the human heart is noble, worthy, and good. As you reflect upon the motivational spectrum, you may wish to identify healthier ways to achieve your dreams: psychotherapy may help those of you who are deeply entangled in the throes of self-torture and self-sabotage.