How to Make Your Life Work by Changing Your Programming

Making your life work means freeing yourself from your ego and rational mind that have kept you trapped in playing out the security, sensation, and power demands that you programmed into your big-computer during the first few years of your life. You have been stuck in these ineffective ruts that make you like a yo-yo bouncing between pain and pleasure. By continually trying to work the unworkable, you have blindly repeated your mistakes.

It has been pointed out that even a rat does not usually get hung up in a fruitless repetition of lifetime patterns that are doomed to failure. Let's suppose there are several tunnels arranged side by side and you put some cheese at the end of tunnel three. Then you turn a rat loose at the entrances. It will sniff around, maybe look them over, and then in a random fashion explore the tunnels until it finds the one with the cheese.

The next time you put the rat near the tunnels, there may be a certain amount of random behavior, but there is a much greater probability that it will go after the cheese in tunnel three. After the rat has done this a few times, it will immediately run down tunnel three to get the cheese.

Suppose that for a period of 60 days the rat finds the cheese at the end of the third tunnel. One day in a rat's life corresponds to about one month in a human life. This would be equivalent to about five years in a human life.

Then suppose the cheese is moved from tunnel three to tunnel four. Now we put the rat near the tunnels and he again runs down tunnel three to get the cheese. But the cheese isn't there any longer. The rat will come out, look the scene over, and try tunnel three again. He may repeat this several times. But after a few repeated trials, with no more cheese, the rat will stop going down tunnel three, and start exploring the other ones.


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Changing Learned Behavior

A big difference between a rat and a human being is that a rat won't continue to run down the tunnel that does not provide cheese whereas a human being may continue to run down the same tunnel for his entire lifetime trying to find the cheese that isn't there! Sooner or later the rat will give up on tunnel three, since it doesn't have a rational mind to continually analyze, compute, and try to prove that the cheese is down tunnel three because it used to be there.

A rat cannot go to a library to read books about cheese and how one is supposed to be able to get it. It cannot formulate arguments or make speeches proving that the cheese should really be down tunnel three; and it cannot try to convince fellow rats that there really is cheese down tunnel three even though it is in fact not there. The nervous system of a rat will quickly adapt to the fact that the cheese just isn't where it used to be and it will start looking somewhere else.

When you were two years old, you probably learned that the way to get the cheese (or whatever you wanted) was to scream loudly and try to power-trip your parents. They seemed to control all the cheese. If you cried and fussed enough, by using your Third Center of Consciousness, (power center or third chakra), you could get them to give you candy or let you stay up late at night, or whatever it was that you wanted.

You were largely unconscious of the overall picture, and your ego kept your awareness focused on your fears and desires. When you looked at life, it was as though you were looking through the end of a long tunnel and saw only a tiny spot of the world at the end of it. The overall picture of life was blocked out by the sides of the tunnel. Your immature biocomputer permitted your fears and desires to project on the screen of your consciousness only a tiny slice of the life realities around you. You had no real choice in your life, because you had no wide-range perception of the people and events around you.

Going Down the Wrong Tunnel?

By age two, you had deeply programmed yourself by using crying to force changes in the people and things around you. At that time in your life, this was one of the few ways you had to get what you wanted from the world. It may be difficult to explain to a two year old that the lower three levels of consciousness generate unhappiness, and that the really big stash of cheese is located at the end of the Love Tunnel.

How do you tell a young child that there is only a little dab of low grade cheese which will never be enough at the end of the Security Tunnel (root chakra), Sensation Tunnel (reproduction chakra),), and Power Tunnel? How do you show a young child that he can have all the cheese that he could ever want by harmonizing his energies with the flow of the people and situations around him? How do you explain to a crying child that loving acceptance of the here and now is the only way that brings continuous happiness in life?

So you get used to running down the Security, Sensation and Power Tunnels hunting for the cheese. You know there must be more cheese in life than you have been getting. Your life is naturally good. It has always been workable. It's just that your biocomputer kept making the same perceptual mistakes over and over and over again.

Why isn't your life working as it should? What is pouring sand in the gears? The problem is simple: your programming continually directs you to find happiness by trying to change the life energies around you. You put most of your attention and energy into trying to manipulate the people and situations in your life. Since you found some cheese at the end of tunnel three during the immature, early years of your life, your ego and your rational mind continue to direct most of your energy into changing the life energies around you to fit your addictive inner programming.

When you apply a heavy enough power trip, you may make certain changes in the life energies around you. But if you were conscious of the enormous separation and alienation that your criticism and manipulation creates with the people around you, you would realize that you cannot afford the price in lost happiness that you pay for the precious few changes you may force on the surface.

The only changes that you can make without paying a large penalty, are those changes that gently and easily happen when you make a loving communication. When that won't do it, you should work on releasing yourself from your inner addictions and emotion-backed demands that are controlling or dominating your consciousness.

Reprogramming Emotion-Backed Demands

When you work on your inner adaptation by reprogramming the emotion-backed demands you place on people and situations in your life, you will find that the life situations and energies that used to create unhappiness will be neutral or positive in their effect on your happiness. Your energy, perceptiveness and ability to love unconditionally will make you invulnerable to suffering. Just as your criticism strongly affects the life energies around you, your positive feedback can begin to powerfully affect the life energies around you.

Just as you created the experience of unhappiness in your life by your continual negative feedback into the life energies around you, you have now, in a god-like manner, created the experience of happiness in your life. You have created a "miracle" -- you are no longer an "effect" of the world around you, you have become a "cause", a creative source. Your higher consciousness has created the beautiful world you live in.

Now you know why your life is naturally good, how your life really wants to work and how your programming has been the only roadblock to your experiencing continuous happiness in life. You know that you have the capacity to create the experience of happiness or the experience of unhappiness in your life.

It all depends on the quality and quantity of critical rejecting energy or accepting loving energy that you feed back into the people and situations around you. You will clearly see how you have kept your life from working and how you can now begin to demonstrate the miracle of creating happiness in your life. And by doing this, you are doing the most you can for other people - for the most effective way to help them is to become a happy, loving, conscious being. Your up-leveling of addictions to preferences enables you to love more and more and the Wheel of Happiness begins to turn.

Article Source

Handbook to Higher Consciousness by Ken Keyes, Jr.Handbook to Higher Consciousness
by Ken Keyes, Jr.

First published by Love Line Books. ©1975.

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About The Author

Ken Keyes, Jr.Ken Keyes is the author of numerous books and the founder of The Science of Happiness. For over 25 years, Ken lead personal growth workshops throughout the United States and in other countries. At his death, Ken was the founding director of the Caring Rapid Healing Center in Coos Bay, Oregon. He facilitated individual and group workshops designed to enable individuals to rapidly transcend the roadblocks in the way of happiness, fulfillment, and inner peace.