Level 4: Communion and Co-Creativity
Being conscious about relationships starts by being aware of our unique Creative Nature and the obstacles we create to challenge us. Without these challenges, we would not need to embody ourselves. Higher Alignment suggests that who we are as a person required all of our life challenges to get where we are today. We tend to see the silver lining and the upside possibilities in every problem. Every relationship brings out different aspects of us, which can either attract or repulse us. We are attracted to individuals with common or interdependent lessons. We are repulsed when others reflect past lessons that we no longer want to engage. Sometimes we experience the unknown, where our sense of adventure or realization that we have little additional bandwidth plays a major part in our decisions. On the Intuitive level, we get more comfortable with being in the unknown.
When we move from competition to cooperation and enthusiasm, it is because we are no longer identifying ourselves from a Personality perspective. As soon as we begin to step into our Primary Creative Expression, everything becomes more open and undefined. The best indicator of this is that we no longer need to prove anything about ourselves. Instead, we accept what we do not know and appreciate that it opens us up to explore and create a better future. Not knowing creates room for Playfulness, Paradox and Mutual Learning. We become dedicated to the adventure of living life fully. We see this as a new commitment to our Creative Self. We are awakened to how much of our life has been dedicated to living out compromised possibilities. Now, we make a commitment to consciously engage relationships of all types and organize ourselves to discover and embrace our Authentic Life Expression.
At this level, we not only embody our Primary Creative Expression (which provides additional Intent and Context to the CNG space), but we begin to recognize deeper difference and similarities in others. HA recommends exploring Compatibility Factors, Motives, Attractions and Relationship Skills to increase the ability to name an experience. This process builds our inner Autonomy and increases Co-Creative Expression because it allows us to feed forward our experiences to others. When true Communion occurs, both parties learn from the experience. When others get to know us creatively and we come to accept ourselves as a Creative Being, the CNG becomes a stronger and richer experience. We do not become as reactive, which allows us to focus our energy towards Co-Creative expressions. This creates a flowering of consciousness as we reorient ourselves to fulfilling our life work and being of service. In short, we manifest our destiny.
On Level 4, we experience duality between our mortal and immortal selves. The more we are creatively empowered, the more we see our creativity as a legacy for later generations. We are inspired to concentrate our efforts on what will make a difference. This means we move into the process of Centralization. Centralization is defining everything in terms of our Primary Creative Expression. It means that our creative self assumes control of our Personality so that our Personality becomes its servant. This does not mean we want to persecute or deny the value of what our Personality brings to us. Instead, it means that when it comes to our Creative Intention, our Primary Expression needs to be able to call the play so the other parts of us can fall into line and be used in the best way possible. Centralization unifies and focuses us on what is critical in our own unfolding. Usually during this period we complete all the relationships that are more Personality-based or that otherwise focus us on the path that is going to allow us to manifest quickly.
What makes us powerful as Co-Creators is our ability to distinguish between what is real within us and what is not. When something is real, we naturally express it with Creative Flow. When it is an Imprint, Pretense or Defense, it is a false pattern, which confuses us and others about our sense of direction and purpose. Most importantly, there is no Creative Flow when we are doing Excitement, Intensity or Anxiety, which these false patterns bring up. The previous three levels discussed in depth how we get attracted to these dissonances, which override our natural attractions. Instead we relax into our Beauty, Truth and Goodness, where we see these imprints, Pretenses and Defenses as obstacles to our current understanding and resourcefulness. We will need to resolve these dissonances in order to move into Level 5. Key to this resolution is releasing our attachments to Imprints, neutralizing inauthentic defensive distortions and eliminating all of our projections around Pretenses.
By now we have probably confronted the Objectification and Subjectification defensive distortions this far into the text. Since we have been alerted to the difficulties of Idealization, we will not discuss those issues here. The false attachments to imprinting keep us fixed in the past and they must be released if we are to express ourselves fully. For example, an individual with a Compassionate Imprint that is committed to being convergent, even though they are naturally divergent, creates inner compromises that impede our progress, growth or expression. If they have adopted a Control Pretense, this further complicates the situation by making it hard to listen to others and receive support. We will work through these issues even as we make great progress clarifying our Creative Nature. Core to this process is rejecting what is unreal within us. While these patterns have been instrumental in helping us understand the issues in our lives, a more direct path is to consciously respond to them. It helps to be able to talk about these issues with friends and partners so they can remind us when we fall below their anti-growth influence.
Now that we are balancing ourselves between our masculine and feminine expressions, and we have the choice to respond to others in appropriate ways that do not compromise us, we need to become more selective about what we are willing to engage. We lose much of our energy picking projects or expressions where we cannot fully succeed. This is usually due to ways we sabotage ourselves by not taking into account our Motives, Attractions, Skills and Compatibility Factors when interacting with others. Many of us jumped into circumstances because it just ‘felt’ okay, without considering the long-term impact on us. Some of us chose to engage processes that may have had a great outcome, but it was not actually one of our lessons. Unless we have a personal connection to something in front of us, and a reason to engage it, we need to learn not to get sucked into it.
Until we learn to be selective and appropriate in our choices of actions, we cannot fully trust ourselves. The result is that we end up either overdoing things or doing nothing. What we want is to build a connection through our labor to the universal Intent. This allows us to be relevant and be seen as a contributor, which allows the universe to contribute to us. If any of these pieces are not connected, we suffer. This means that making the right inner connections to our selves and finding the lessons that mirror this out into the world is essential to our well being. Instead of fixating on our dreams as we did in the preceding level, we now realize our aspirations must be balanced with our inspiration. The inner and outer must be connected to successfully manifest in a sustained way. This connection is about affirming that we create the meaning we have for our lives.
The best way to manifest this connection is by simultaneously empowering our Being with our Becoming. Being is empowering our feminine nature and reflecting its mystery to accept ourselves for the perfection we are in the moment. To accomplish this we need to see our own creative pathway and destiny. Some individuals would call this knowing where we want to go. Becoming is recognizing the masculine perspective that we have considerable opportunities to improve our circumstances, and that we are always refining the ways we express our mastery allowing us to do more with less. It is about recognizing where we are so that with the feminine side we can map out a plan to get where we want to go. When we put these two together, we have creative empowerment and an ability to love ourselves and love others without limitations.
What makes us creative beings is ownership of our contribution. In the process of exploring our Authentic Life Expression, there are three elements that define where we are in the process. They are: our Creative Nature; our Constituency; and our Contribution. It is the interaction between these three elements and how they function as a unified expression that generates the magic. This magic is the support of Universal Intent. In other words, does the universe support our contribution at this time? While many of us think that every idea has its time, we believe that everyone has his or her place and time. This means we focus on how these three elements fit into the current circumstances and serve a larger possibility. At this level we learn how to move beyond our Personality perceptions and become more of a transpersonal agent for the benefit of the planet. What we realize is that we have reached a level of maturity where alluring or shiny things no longer demand our attention. We also recognize that beliefs are limiting and keep us from being with our Truth in the moment. Finally, we realize that dreams of great ideas are not the issue, but it is what we put in action that speaks for us.
What this does is open us up to hundreds of choices each and every day. We learn to examine the possibilities and seek deeper understanding about each choice before we commit ourselves to it. We develop relationships in service of the choices we make so we can see the best way to ground and make these dreams real. This indicates that we have reoriented ourselves so that our Creative Nature defines how our Personality Nature responds. It means that we are solution-oriented, rather than problem magnets. We learn to operate fully from our Creative Power, realigning our lower elements to serve our higher knowing. The more we do this, the more others see how enlightened we are. This last statement is designed to test your Upper Boundary Limits. How much are you willing to get out of your comfort zone?
What makes us powerful as Co-Creators is our ability to distinguish between what is real within us and what is not. When something is real, we naturally express it with Creative Flow. When it is an Imprint, Pretense or Defense, it is a false pattern, which confuses us and others about our sense of direction and purpose. Most importantly, there is no Creative Flow when we are doing Excitement, Intensity or Anxiety, all of which these false patterns bring up. The previous three levels discussed in depth how we get attracted to these dissonances, which override our natural attractions. Instead we relax into our Beauty, Truth and Goodness, where we see these imprints, Pretenses and Defenses as obstacles to our current understanding and resourcefulness. We will need to resolve these dissonances in order to move into Level 5. Key to this resolution is releasing our attachments to Imprints, neutralizing inauthentic defensive distortions and eliminating all of our projections around Pretenses.
By now, we have probably confronted the Objectification and Subjectification defensive distortions this far into the text. Since we have been alerted to the difficulties of Idealization, we will not discuss those issues here. The false attachments to imprinting keep us fixed in the past and they must be released if we are to express ourselves fully. For example, an individual with a Compassionate Imprint that is committed to being convergent, even though they are naturally divergent, creates inner compromises that impede progress, growth or expression. If they have adopted a Control Pretense, this further complicates the situation by making it hard for them to listen to others and receive support. We will work through these issues while making great progress clarifying our Creative Nature. Core to this process is rejecting what is unreal within us. While these patterns have been instrumental in helping us understand the issues in our lives, a more direct path is to consciously respond to them. It helps to be able to talk about these issues with friends and partners so they can remind us when we fall below their anti-growth influence.