Lishui's Pathway of Human Potential

Okay, it's not really Lishui's pathway. It's what I put together from Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Dr. Hawkins' scale of consciousness, Glenn Doman's human developmental pathway, the Eight Shields teachings, and stuff I figured out doing a lot of meditating.

How it Works

There are three basic phases of life. First is survival as an individual. Next is the stage of belonging and esteeming self and being esteemed by others. Finally, there is self-actualization, which will eventually merge us into pure consciousness with no more striving of any kind (the "afterlife," if you will). These occur in a hierarchical gradation, one gradually shifting into the next as the "lower" needs are met. As Abraham Maslow and Glenn Doman pointed out, when lower needs aren't met, higher needs are irrelevant. Each level requires fulfilment of the level below; for example, one would not experience conscious living if one was not surviving and one would not transcend into an enlightenment state if one was not able to live consciously. For another example, nobody is interested in sex when they can't breathe properly.

The upper end of enlightenment grades into pure consciousness, at which point the Buddhists believe the body dissolves into unpatterned energy. The body will do this anyway at death, regardless of whether the person achieved enlightenment or even conscious living beforehand. Brain and body are the servants of consciousness, not the container and certainly not the origin of it. Brain and body will develop and eventually die irrespective of the level of consciousness that is attained.

Brain and body develop without conscious effort. However, all development of consciousness does require effort or striving. Or, at the very least, the act of making choices. An intentional life is one of striving to increase in consciousness. This process requires receiving new and unexpected experiences into your consciousness. Problems in life are the result of trying to respond to a new experience at a higher level of consciousness than you have attained for that type of experience, because you have not received that type of experience into your consciousness at a lower level response yet. The reason you haven't received that type of experience into your consciousness is because when you had that type of experience it posed a conflict that you were unable, at the time, to resolve.

Basic development of sensory and motor functions, bodily skills, brain development, psyche, and ego are complete by age six, on average. It takes, on average, approximately another six years to gain experiences and receive them into consciousness, in order to finish up filling in the blanks, so to speak, in the survival phase. Then our bodies go into puberty and we become adults. At this time, our attention turns to an active community role: we develop sexual and leadership relationships, find our unique position in the tribe, and become parents to guide the next generation through the survival process. Gradually the role of the ego diminishes relative to the role of consciousness, intuition, or spirituality.

At first we are utterly dependent on a biological other to support us. Once the ego is in place, we use it to depend on our skills in relating to others to support ourselves. Beyond that, we eventually rely more and more on consciousness itself to support us until, ultimately, we deliver ourselves entirely up to spirit.

Ego is an important part of the brain-body system, because it is protective. The most enlightened living being must still survive and stay safe for as long as she has a body. However, as our consciousness expands exponentially, the relative amount of attention given to ego and survival becomes less and less until, ultimately, it isn't needed anymore. Pure consciousness is infinite, while an ego and a body have distinct boundaries.

What's Your Level of Development?

Emotions are the biological (brain-body) response to new and unexpected (that is, stressful) experiences. The human developmental pathway asks us to receive experiences into our consciousness and make something of them so that our life can be more meaningful as a result. We receive these experiences with whatever level of consciousness we have developed for that type of experience. For example, I tend to respond to most new situations from a position of trying to understand. However, I have not been able to develop my consciousness level nearly as much when it comes to experiences related to hearing annoying or loud sounds. Until a couple years ago, I tended to respond to these types of experiences with fear. But I have done some personal work in this realm and am now more likely, when experiencing stressful sounds or noises, to respond with anger.

You can know when someone (yourself, for example) has made progress in personal growth if your typical stress response is at a higher emotional level than it used to be. For example, if you now respond to stressful experiences by forgiving yourself and others but a ffew years ago, you normally dealt with new stressful experiences by affirming what was good in your life, you have moved up from the affirming level to the forgiving level, and that is major progress. Similarly, if a child now usually responds to new experiences with desire when he used to usually respond with apathy, that child has become more mature in his consciousness.

Adults assert their own personal rights. Children do not have the hang of this, and need adults to model appropriate boundaries for them until they receive an appropriate range of experiences into their consciousness and can move forward on their own. At the transition of puberty, this is supposed to be in place because we're biologically ready to move onward to focus on relationships and higher purposes in life. Survival should happen naturally, with little or no conscious attention.

Ego forms in childhood to protect our personal integrity, integrity of body, psyche as individual, separate from others. Through the second phase of personal development (conscious living) the ego is gradually superseded by a larger understanding. Ego remains to protect body, psyche, but only for that purpose. Someone who is "egotistical" or who is making choices from ego instead of consciously, is someone who is in survival mode and can't fully receive adult experiences into his consciousness.

So, what's going on when an adult is still largely focused on survival? What happens when someone who is biologically an adult, perhaps acts as a leader in his community, or even as a spiritual guide, but he himself is usually proud, angry, greedy, or even fearful? What's up with an adult whose attention is still largely focused on survival? This happens to describe the majority of civilized (domesticated) human beings - around 75-80% of humanity right now, according to Dr. David Hawkins.

What this describes is an emotional child who thinks he is an adult: someone who feels spiritually advanced when in fact he is operating from a pre-pubescent ego state. And the lower his consciousness when he rises to power, the more horrifying the results will be.

A Nudge Along the Pathway

At any time, if an experience can't be fully received into consciousness, your development in that aspect is arrested. This limits your ability to develop in other ways, and at some point all non-physical aspects of your development will come to a halt, too. This will be experienced as patterns: repeating experiences and situations.

In our current civilization, the majority of our personal problems result from incomplete experiences during early childhood, usually before the age six, and often even before birth.

These incomplete experiences are stacked up further during the completion of childhood between age six and puberty. They then become our primary life challenges through young adult development. Our personal vision quest is about discovering the meaning of these obstacles, and then using that learning to contribute to larger existence. Our (now-global) culture does not encourage us to take charge of our adult lives and assert our personal rights. Authority figures treat us like children our entire lives. As a result, the majority of people have a consciousness level in the child/survival stage. You can really see this among the elderly, who often give up and allow themselves to be coddled like infants.

The solution to problems of mind, body, emotions, and spirit is in finding out where the developmental interruption occured, and then going back to that level to receive that experience into consciousness. This process can be done in many ways, but my favourite, because it gets right in there into the mind and straight to the incomplete experience(s) is the use of the Clearing Communication Cycle.

Healing becomes less and less likely as we get older, but it is always equally possible.

In summary, Lishui's Pathway of Human Development () is:

1. experience human existence
2. experience community
3. experience the laws of life and thermodynamics (ecology and physics)
4. pure experience