Wizards Cache

Listen:

Canyonland to guide your thoughts by Deborah Martin-Lemmon

Inspiration for title

A preceptory was a subordinate house or community of the Knights Templar (a commandery) and a preceptor was a teacher.  I developed and for years facilitated a training program titled  Preceptorial Training.  It had no correlation with this legendary order of priests except that their “secret teachings” were different than the excepted norm in their day and for that they were tried as heretics.  We modern heretics are also challenging a belief; your first belief, personality or “I believe I am.”

Idea of self

Can you imagine, we create the concept of personal self between ages two and eight, test it, improve it some, and hold true to it till we pass from life—or used to.  This structure we adopt as a guideline for what we identify with is called personality.  Literally this is a story conceived by family, supported by local culture and influenced by a dance of energy that produces patterns from random movements.  This is our first belief system, “I believe I am”, and it is the index called “self” that we insert into our life stories to represent our self.  Add to this initial project an unfolding quest to perceive wholeness (all pieces) and life systematically becomes more complex over time.  Complex meaning more components and not necessarily more complicated.  This change is driven by the evolutionary mandate of our culture and our personal drive toward a perceived  level of value from improvement; nothing today holds true for a lifetime.  Another way you might express this is that the time has come to abandon the concept of an absolute truth.  This old idea was useful in repairing our notion of personal power but not congruent, of course, with a model of free will.  The wise solution is to stop, consciously, the habit or thought of being the same unchanging self for all of your life.  What we believe (hold without change) produces the resistance to this act of integration.  This step may take some guided attention. 

Growth or change in the concept of self

I had already created and implemented the Transformation Training Program to address the issue of what many refer to as “spiritual growth.”  I define spiritual as a theme of potential and growth as movement directed toward change.  The process is to integrate what we have learned, what we discover as clues along our path of movement, and what we create that becomes part of the redundant subconscious operation of life—improving the quality of life based on this integration.  This training proved very effective with re-framing and re-defining personal self.  Awareness is the title for how long (span of attention) and/or how big (chunk size) our taste or conscious sample of life is that we are processing in this moment—making personal as a story about self now.   Awareness of “now” only contains awareness of creation and any belief system moves us away from this unique awareness.  If we are not creating, i.e., the act of exchanging energy to form, we are then created as a “particle or object” somewhere.  Awareness of creation is valid now without question but awareness of life as a location needs validation.  Both processes are of value and are essential to balance in growth.  The Transformation Training Program provided a strong guidance towards creating that balance in growth. The demand from the evolutionary mandate for change was a different issue. 

Observing the meme conflict

Daily I was witnessing conflict and increasing polarization from the two active evolutionary memes with a third meme starting to emanate into culture.  Some of my student population came from strong traditional families but most were “new age”, a pseudo term for anti-traditional.  Of course, anti-polarization is still a form of polarization and not compatible with the new Modern Meme and even more distant from the fast emanating Post-modern version.  My success with the Transformation program inspired me to design a platform addressing the meme components from the works of Clare Graves and the numerous published evolutionary psychologists; my favorite being Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self .  Systematically the training material introduces students over two years to the different stages of human development, not as truths but a stimulant to rediscover and secure potential changes through an awakened cognition and a sensory awareness of this offer of change.  They would and did naturally project this discovered sense of meaning into a new and congruent model with this emanating change to entertain as self; again, an index in a new story.  The last year of the three year program was focused on meta-patterns for humans to secure these newly discovered references to the formally unknown and currently arriving meme changes.  The goal was to offer students an opportunity in “becoming” and not a change in “knowing” who they were.  I’m now retired but several of my former students are in the process of updating this program and their version may soon be available.  Please contact me for updates on their progress.