The Power of I AM
Personal Empowerment in Real World Situations
John Maxwell Taylor's new book, The Power of I Am: Creating a New World of Enlightened Personal Interaction (Frog Ltd.) draws on his 35 years of experience in the public arena, spiritual self-development and esoteric understanding. As a Paris based European recording artist in the 60's, his bands opened for The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and he performed for Queen Elizabeth and the Royal Family. As an award winning actor and playwright he received international acclaim for his one-man play “Forever Jung,” giving over 250 performances. A long time practitioner of the meditation techniques of Paramahansa Yogananga and the “Iron Shirt Chi Kung” techniques of Taoist Master Mantak Chia. John now tours internationally, presenting workshops and seminars that teach us how to stay centered and empowered in any social situation.
Many people who are trying to live the conscious life feel overwhelmed by the negativity and tension that is so pervasive in society today. How do you deal with people who are caught up in that and behave badly towards you?
About fifteen years ago I developed a system I call “Sociological Aikido” in which I applied martial arts and mindfulness principles to everyday interpersonal encounters. After noticing how much energy we expend in useless arguments and unproductive interactions with people caught in the grip of negative emotions and unbalanced behavior, I decided to adopt non-cooperation with those who fail to respect personal space. I realized that I could help no one overcome a negative state by letting myself get hypnotized into mental, emotional and physical reactivity. True compassion requires great inner strength and the ability to maintain a clear field of energy in and around oneself, no matter who or what we are dealing with.
In your new book, The Power of I AM, you guide us through a blend of enlightening tools, personal stories and life lessons, to achieve inner strength and deal effectively with verbal and emotional abuse and anti social behavior. How did you set about training yourself?
The first thing I had to do was get out of my head. Almost everyone you meet is a talking head! It's an unnatural side effect of age of information. We can't stop thinking or talking and are basically frying our own brains with an excess of yang/fire energy. My personal answer to this was to get completely body centered. I do this by placing my attention on every part of the body simultaneously, no matter what I am doing. One can learn to hold the field of total body awareness through every activity: walking, speaking, eating, making love etc. The result is a thick sense of presence and a tingling sensation that permeates the arms, hands, legs, feet and torso etc., and a natural dropping of ones center of gravity from the head back down into to the body.
This practice helps evoke an experiential connection with a universal presence that can be felt radiating through one's being—I AM consciousness. We feel an internal power that is greater than one's personality, yet infuses the personal self with strength and confidence. Oddly enough, doing this in a conflict situation only seems to increase the effect. As the sense of I AM starts to manifest in, through and around one's self, it also engulfs the other person. Then the I AM in them then awakens and sees the I AM in you. This makes our habitual sense of separation from the rest of creation melt back into a shared perception of unity. I have seen people shift right out of an antagonistic mood and seek interpersonal connection and reconciliation as a result of having their energy field thrown into sync with a higher reality this way.
But suppose someone is really getting in your face. Are you just going to stand there and get off into some altered state of consciousness and say nothing? Doesn't life require us to participate in the game, even when we know it is all an illusion?
Great point! I absolutely agree with you. And this is where the fun comes in. When you get the knack of it, you can create a personal shift to a higher reality in a tense social situation in less than three seconds. If the other person doesn't pick up on it, start to reconcile, then you do “conscious acting.” By that I mean, instead of falling into a knee-jerk response, you simply play a role...act out how you want to come across in the immediate scene the improvisational theatre of life is laying out before you. Instead of getting angry and becoming possessed by reactivity, you consciously choose to say and do what needs to be said and done to create the shift. But there is no malice or personal agenda behind it. You are not creating karma for yourself by personally seeking to wound another person. You are reordering the external energy dynamic between the two of you and you're helping to stabilize the world by coming from a place of great personal solidity.
It sounds like the advice Krishna gives in the Baghavad Gita when he tells Arjuna that if he acts in the struggle of life without personal motive to harm his adversaries, he will be fulfilling his Dharma without accruing karmic consequences.
That's right. In the act of inflicting pain on others in retaliation to the pain we feel they are causing us, we bind ourselves to the cycle of suffering again. An action performed dispassionately can set us free. The same action, committed out of revenge, binds us to the wheel of life. There was once a Samurai whose master was killed by a brigand. He was duty bound by his code of honor to track the man down and execute him. When he caught up with the murderer, a great fight ensued. Finally, the Samurai got the upper hand and was about to decapitate the villain, but as a last gesture of defiance, the man spit in the warrior's face. The Samurai sheathed his sword and walked away. Up until that moment he had simply been fulfilling his duty dispassionately. But when the brigand spat in his face, he felt a reactive personal desire to punish the man for his insolent act. So he walked away.
Then we need to deal with negative behavioral stuff as it comes up with other people, but without feeling self-justified, “teaching them a lesson” and that sort of thing? You're saying that spiritual people should be stronger than those who are caught up in the negativity that is engulfing the world?
How else can we save this planet from destruction? George Bernard Shaw once said, “If the Christians want to redeem anybody they had better start looking a bit more redeemed.” That goes for spiritual people everywhere of every faith and belief. I love Gandhi's statement that “the time of religion is over . . . The time of spirituality has begun.” Being “religious” isn't enough anymore. Look at what religions are doing to the world right now in the name of God. The “religious” wolves have taken the country away from the spiritual sheep. True spirituality is a lived experience of divine intelligence, a living presence that one can sense and feel in oneself and others. We must cultivate the ability “to hold that field” no matter how others are behaving towards us. That is the energy that will eventually supercede the apparent power of the old paradigms that are crashing all around us at the present time.
Those who hold to them may seem to have power, but it is an illusion. Real power is an attribute of consciousness, not egotism. Every time we become conscious of our higher selves in the face of negativity, our personal value goes up on the cosmic stock exchange. Then the universal intelligence behind the scenes of life can guide us to still greater opportunities to bring more clarity to the world by enlightening it through us. That is a profound law of spiritual and material success. In the book I talk about always being able to make a profit out of any situation by increasing our “level of being.” This is the “atomic weight” of who we are, the energy and magnetism that surges through us when we walk in a room. It is our “level of being” that attracts our lives! To change our lives we can supercharge our level of being by cultivating I AM awareness.
In The Power of I AM you give many step-by-step methods and techniques by which we can train ourselves to deal with anything while staying centered and generating consciousness and pres-ence. What are some of the key points?
First and foremost we learn to generate a perception of I AM as an energetic presence within ourselves. This is not something we have to get from outside. It is already there. But we do need the tools and techniques to trigger it while we are out and about in daily life. Secondly, learning to use the energy arising from I AM to influence our immediate environment. We human beings tend to replicate the state of people around us. If someone else's negativity is stronger than our positive charge, we may go under. But the power of I AM can possess us so strongly, it can calm it down, not just another person, but a whole roomful of people and seduce them towards the light. This is a major asset for anyone who speaks to the public on spiritual/visionary matters. We must also know how to deal with energy vampires, people who will suck the life-force right out of us and be able to neutralize troublemakers while using self-assertion instead of aggression. Another advantage of doing this work is that when we have all this back up from our real self, we feel very joyful inside and can meet people with ease and self-confidence.
Can you say something about the “personality eye” and the “essence eye” and knowing which eye to look in during conversations?
The two eyes of an individual reveal the two sides of a human being. The “personality eye” is wired to the brain in such a way that one can read personal history and character through it. The “essence eye” is a portal to the soul. Knowing which one to look in is a huge key to staying conscious during social interactions. When you look in the “essence eye” of a person, you can usually connect instantly with their better instincts and bring out the best in them. Conversely, if someone is being obnoxious, a quick glance into their “personality eye,” while doing some of the inner techniques I describe, will get them to back off. Then we can go back to the “essence eye” and see if they want to get real, or stay stuck in false personality. Which eye is which varies, depending on whether one is right-handed, left-handed, gay, dyslexic, etc. I go into these differences in detail in the book, clearly illustrating which is which. Once we get seeing the difference down and can act on what we see, we can orchestrate a positive outcome to difficult situations.
Do these tools work as well for women as men? Can you give me an example of how a woman might use them in a real world situation?
Saying and doing what needs to be said to correct abusive behavior towards us is not gender specific. It is a universal requirement for those who wish to inhabit spiritual maturity and be effective in the world. And if it is all done in a spirit of conscious acting, it can be great creative fun, as my friend Kimberly demonstrated when we went for afternoon tea in La Jolla. Kim is a small, attractive, dignified woman, dresses well, and carries a palpable air of spiritual intelligence about her. And she is a very sharp reader of people. Recognizing the waiter as he headed towards our table she said to me . . . “Oh dear, this guy likes to make trouble. I've had him before. Watch. He'll act in a disruptive manner.”
Sure enough, while showing us a selection of tea bags in a wooden box, the guy suddenly slammed the lid in our faces. Then he smirked with pleasure at having startled us, apologized facetiously, and reopened the lid to show us the contents of the box once more. Then slam! He banged the lid shut in our faces again. I felt Kimberly gather her energy. Then she looked up at him with quiet strength as presence emanated from her and said…“That's twice you've slammed that box lid in our faces. I have to tell you, if it happens again you will awaken something in me that you will find very unpleasant.”
The guy's eyes widened like a deer in the headlights of truth as his soul caught him with his pants down in a trance in the middle of the road to nowhere. As a result he instantly became a perfect gentleman, smiling, courteous and genuinely wanting to connect. Kimberly wasn't rude or personally aggressive. Speaking consciously and without a trace of reactivity, she simply realigned the man's energy interaction with hers so that his own negativity threw his ego across the room. This is the essence of Aikido. He had been in the grip of his automatic programming and a need to be dominant. When he tried to dump this on us, Kimberly called him on it. But before she spoke, she became connected with her own higher self as presence. When she did speak, it was from that state. And it shifted him into connection with his own higher nature.
Then you can actually create a state of “enlightened personal interaction” with someone even if they are not aware of it?
That's how it is going to happen most of the time. Ninety percent of the human race is caught up in reactive behavioral patterns. They are too asleep to make the leap to hyper-personal clarity. But when we rouse to wakefulness our own dormant power and fill body, mind and emotions with I AM presence in the face of interpersonal difficulty, the I AM underlying the other individuals personality structure will activate and interact with us. Sometimes this will cause them to have a shift on the personality level, sometimes not. In any event, we are not separating ourselves in consciousness from the God that they are. We are seeing the perfection in them, even while they may be acting out towards us from total delusion. On one level you are dealing with a sleeping person.
At the same time, you are seeing their “Being,” that which they “really” are. It is awake and looking at you “through” this person. They don't know it is there because they are so caught up in limited personal identity based on “who and what they think they are.” But I AM can lift them out of it. I have seen amazing shifts in people when two seemingly separate manifestations of I AM connect and restore unity to life. The energy of new, more enlightened world of possible personal interaction shines forth. Carl Jung spelled it out perfectly. “One does not become conscious by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.” This is “real world” work. It releases the light that is trapped inside the darkness of human ignorance by addressing it where it really counts—in our day-to-day affairs with our fellow human beings.
So if I put into practice what you outline in the book, will I be able to walk through life with the slings and arrows just bouncing off me? Do you ever get thrown off?
The best answer to that comes from Morihei Ueshiba, the creator of Aikido. He said, “It's not that I don't get thrown off, I recover so quickly that you don't notice I was away.” I don't think we can sum it up any better than that.
John Maxwell Taylor can be reached via his web site www.worldtransformations.com or 760/736-7852. Meet him Feb. 11 from 11 to 2pm at Rainy's Mystic Books in San Marcos. 760/744-9818. He will host a Power of I Am workshop at the Vista First Church of Religious Science from 1-3pm on Sunday, Feb. 19. On March 5 he will host the same at San Jaun Capistrano RSI and be the guest speaker at the 9 and 11am services. 949/240-6463.
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