Often people ask WHY they keep making mistakes. Why, they ask, can we not just keep moving forward in an unbroken and unbending line, toward greater and greater happiness?
Why can’t we continuously hold on to the joy we felt in the beginning, when we felt understood, accepted, and loved?
A multitude of answers could be offered, but the answer could be expressed in a single word: gravity.
Timestamps:
00:00 The path of Real Love is unfamiliar and making mistakes is common.
01:22 Physics of mass and gravity and how they relate to your life.
05:15 All past experiences, all your reactions, the present behaviors you encounter, and your genetic makeup add to your "mass."
07:28 How your "mass" attracts similar events in people.
08:33 How your "mass" affects the decision you make each day.
09:29 The "mass" grows as choices and responses accumulate and creates gravity.
10:02 Example in real life.
13:24 Learn to choose love and find love that heals and change your "mass" and an example.
16:02 Escape your prison by setting your sights higher and move toward it - example.
12:21 Metaphor of orbital decay.
26:33 Don't quit, make whatever effort is required.
Transcript:
As people learn about Real Love, and as they feel Real Love and the exalting changes that come with it, they become excited and hopeful.
How Emotional Gravity Affects Our Happiness
In the process of growing, however, they discover that this new path is quite unfamiliar—the world does not run on unconditional love—so they make a LOT of mistakes. This is not unfortunate, certainly not tragic. It’s just utterly unavoidable as we learn an entirely different way of living.
Often people ask WHY they keep making mistakes. Why, they ask, can we not just keep moving forward in an unbroken and unbending line, toward greater and greater happiness? Why can’t we continuously hold on to the joy we felt in the beginning, when we felt understood, accepted, and loved?
A multitude of answers could be offered, but the answer could be expressed in a single word: gravity.
A Brief Lesson in the Physics of Gravity
First a brief lesson in physics. In the initial formation of the universe, it is theorized that an initial explosion occurred—the “Big Bang”—where unfathomable quantities of matter and energy were thrown out from one place. Individual atoms were hurled into space, along with larger clumps of material, or mass.
Mass is just another name for material or matter or “stuff,” as distinguished from energy. Conceptually, mass is almost the same as weight, but weight is really mass combined with gravity. An elephant, for example, has a lot of both mass and weight. But in space, the elephant has no weight (because there’s no gravity) but still has lots of mass.
Over time—often billions of years—these initial particles bumped into each other and often stuck to each other, forming increasingly large chunks of mass. You see, mass is both attracted by the gravity of other objects, and also creates gravity that attracts other objects.
The greater the mass of an object, the more surrounding particles and objects it attracts, which increases even more the mass of the first object, along with increasing the gravity that will attract even more mass.
Eventually some bodies of mass became large enough to draw large number of adjacent particles and objects, and they became planets, stars, solar systems, interstellar gas clouds (trillions of miles across), and galaxies.
Every object that falls into a larger mass increases the mass of that object and thereby increases the gravitational pull of that object. In short, more mass means more gravity, which is why the gravity of the sun, or of the planet Jupiter, is so much greater than the gravity of earth.
If you hold an apple in your hand, it too has gravity, but the mass of the apple is so small that you couldn’t possibly notice the individual atoms in the area that are attracted to it.
Emotional Gravity
Now, let’s look at emotional, spiritual, and intellectual gravity. Imagine that you are standing—because you ARE—on a planet composed of the following (not meant to be an exhaustive list):
- Every experience you’ve ever had. Every interaction you’ve had with another person, and every circumstance, has added to the mass—the planet—of the past on which you stand. Every time someone is kind or unkind, every time you are taught a truth or a lie, each single experience adds to the mass of the planet you’re standing on.
- Your reactions to people and circumstances. Every time you respond with fear, anger, victimhood, or love, you add to the mass of your past.
- The present behaviors and circumstances you encounter. Everyone has their own pain, anger, capacity to love, and more, and these conditions in the present add to the mass of your planet.
- Factors that are less obvious: your genetic makeup, your epigenetics, and your physical environment—gamma rays, chemicals in the air and water, other forms of radiation.
Every experience and person and circumstance in your life contributes to the mass that affects you every minute of every day.
How the "Mass" of Life Affects You
This mass does several things:
- It tends to attract similar events and people (different from physical mass and gravity). To illustrate, if you have been sufficiently victimized and taught to feel like a victim at a young age, you will tend to attract not just random experiences passing by—like gravity attracts anything at all with any mass—but you will selectively attract and create more experiences that will support your basic belief in victimhood. You will attract people who see or feel your victimhood, who will use you, who will hurt you, who will enlist you to their victimhood. You will SEE things as a victim and see injury where there is none, or exaggerate it where it is there.
- Affects the decisions you make every minute of the day. This cannot be overstated. If a man was treated with controlling, criticism, and anger by his mother, for example, it is almost guaranteed that as he interacts with his wife, he will treat her as thought she WERE his mother. Most people suffer from enough PCSD that they don’t even make decisions. They just react to the pain of the past—to the gravity of the past.
- It grows every day as choices, responses, and a great number of unknown factors accumulate. The more love you experience, and the more you share, the more you will tend to act from a place—a mass, with gravity—that generates even more love. The more you experience anger, and react to anger, the more anger you will attract to the mass beneath your feet, and the more you will react to it, creating more gravity.
A Real Life Illustration of Emotional Mass and Gravity
To briefly illustrate, if you were raised without RL—which is true of nearly everyone—you carry around with you uncounted experiences that generated feelings of emptiness, fear, anger, withdrawal, and more.
Those experiences have then affected your every subsequent feeling, thought, and behavior. With sufficient lack of love, your pain will RULE your life.
(Notice I said just “lack of love,” because that’s all it takes. No overt trauma is necessary to destroy the soul of a child and later an adult).
Ruled by pain and fear, you thought you were making choices, but mostly you’ve just reacted to pain, which in turn caused more pain and fear—and IS causing more pain and fear now. The mass gets bigger and creates gravity that becomes increasingly irresistible.
Eventually the mass of past unloving experiences becomes the size of a large planet, and you discover that you can’t make choices anymore. You just react.
The gravity of your past and present is pulling you flat to the ground, where you can barely move.
Jupiter has great deal more mass than the earth, so on its surface you would weight 2.5 times what you do now. Hard to get out of bed weighing 180 pounds? Now imagine weighing 450 pounds. On the surface of larger planets or stars, you would just be crushed to death, as many people ARE by the gravity of their past.
Against the force of this increasing mass, we can struggle to get up, and we do, over and over, but without enough love, the original pain and fear remain, so all we can do is add to the mass and the gravity.
First Step to Overcome Emotional Gravity
What can we do? Are we doomed to die face down in the mud? No, we can learn to make choices. We can learn to find the love that heals the pain. We can learn to leave this crushing gravitational force of the past.
The first step usually is to stop increasing the gravity of the planet we’re on. We have to stop adding mass to the planet that’s trapping us. How does that translate into our every day lives?
People: There are people who whine, manipulate, get angry, control, and so on, each time adding mass to the soul-sucking gravity of our planet. We have to avoid such people where possible. But what if they’re family members, as they often are? All the more reason to avoid them, because they constantly add to a mass they helped create in the first place.
Influences: We’ve all acquired behaviors or habits that temporarily alleviate the pain in our lives: video games, Facebook, political talk shows, YouTube, alcohol, porn, anger, and on and on. We simply can’t afford the mass and gravity they bring to our lives.
Many of these “influences” are serious addictions. Sometimes we have to stop them before we can make any changes. Sometimes, though, we have to make genuine changes—getting loved—before we can stop our addictions. Or we work on getting loved and stopping our addictions at the same time.
Second Step: Set Our Sights Higher
Now, the second step to diminish the gravity that would keep us bound to the past as surely as chains or prison bars: escape. It’s not enough simply to fight something, in this case gravity or prison bars. We have to set our sights much higher than that. If we’re not happy, peaceful, and loving, we want to escape our planet’s gravity entirely. We want to genuinely live, not just spend a lifetime slogging through the mud as gravity attempts to drag us beneath the surface.
So, we need to identify a higher plane of living and move TOWARD it, not just away from the old gravity and mere survival. How? Move toward what? To name just a few:
- The love of another person, someone who genuinely sees and loves us—a wise person
- The love of God, the ultimate Wise Person
- Being loving toward others
- Being responsible for our own choices, never blaming people or things for our condition
- Happiness, a natural result of the other goals above.
The Importance of Thrust to Escape Gravity
In the process of escaping the gravity of a lifetime of experience, we can’t even contemplate being half committed to this. Halfway just isn’t enough to overcome gravity of this magnitude.
We have to generate enough thrust away from the surface to escape the gravity and achieve orbit around the mass, weightless in the space above it—unaffected by gravity.
Simply making half-hearted leaps into the air is fruitless, because all we do is fall back to the ground, often injured and adding to the mass.
Back to physical gravity for a moment. If a rocket shoots into the air and rises to a height of 60 miles from the surface—exactly what some commercial rockets have done for their high-paying customers—the acceleration, the thrill, and the view are spectacular. No doubt about it—it’s why they pay a lot for the experience—but then the vehicle must return to the earth from whence it came. Gravity pulls it back to earth. It was fun, but nothing fundamental has changed.
In order to rise to 100 miles—not so much farther than 60 miles—and to achieve a condition of orbit around the earth, you need 32 times the energy—yes, thirty-two times—consumed by that sub-orbital fun flight we just described.
This is very similar to the changes required to leave our emotional past behind. If we don’t go all the way in to achieve orbit, we just keep jumping up and down.
We might even get to 60 miles high, 60 miles from the mass, but we will fall back to the gravity below.
But if we consistently seek the love we need, and if we’re willing to leave behind our excuses, our justifications, our denial, our distrust, and our addictions, we CAN achieve orbit and freedom, and when it comes to emotional orbit, it does not require 32 times the effort of jumping 60 miles high over and over again, which produces no results at all.
In fact, the effort of slogging through the mud while being sucked down by gravity can be soul-destroying. THAT is the biggest effort, and it produces no good result. THAT is the dumb way to live.
The Importance of Velocity
So let’s say that you find the Real Love you need. You believe it, trust it, embrace it, luxuriate in it, share it with others, learn to be responsible, and achieve genuine happiness.
Now you’re in low orbit. Don’t be satisfied with that. Orbits eventually decay, and objects fall back to earth, especially if the orbit is low (100-1200 miles).
Orbits become lower with insufficient velocity, for example. You slow down every time you hit even single molecules of gas drifting briefly away from the atmosphere. Your orbit is affected by the gravitational influence of the moon and other stars, and more.
With very little effort, however—compared to achieving orbit in the first place—an object already in orbit can reach a higher orbit, and then it’s much less likely to fall to the ground, especially if the mass is large and the velocity is sufficient.
The moon, for example, is in orbit, and its mass and velocity make it unlikely to fall to the earth for billions of years. Same with the orbit of the earth around the sun.
Every time we make a RIGHT choice—we choose to feel loved, choose to be loving, choose to be responsible and happy—we add mass and velocity to the growing moon we’re creating, the moon orbiting the earth, the moon that has risen above the past and the PCSD that was killing us.
If we keep going, we become a planet even bigger than the one we left, and achieve an orbit so high that we’re not really tied to the past anymore. Wow.
We can establish our own orbit around a different center—like the sun, for example—where orbits are measured in billions of years. And we won’t be alone. We can be with others who have accomplished this. We can invite others to join us.
Do All You Can to Escape the Gravity of the Past
What am I saying? DON’T QUIT.
Make whatever effort is required, whatever sacrifices, so you can escape the gravity of the past.
Find every bit of love you can, be grateful for it instead of forgetting it (as most do).
Make choices instead of reacting to diminish pain. Surround yourself with loving people.
Share the love you have.
Keep making right choices, happy choices, and one day you’ll discover that you’ve BECOME a planet, orbiting the sun, instead of slogging through the mud, exhausted.
The power of genuine happiness is indescribable. It’s worth everything we have to reach it—individually, in relationships, and as parents.
And as parents, we can teach our children how to do the same. Keep going. We can’t know what it’s like to reach orbit and establish our own gravity until we do it. But we CAN do it.
To those of you who are already learning how to love and teach, I bow my head in acknowledgment of your heroism.
To those of you who have not yet learned about unconditional love, I promise you that it’s worth the effort.
We all have the opportunity to be involved in this changing of lives, beginning with our own.
