Our Founder

Who is the Founder? What is this about?

My name is Larry Byram and I am the founder of this work and Higher Alignment. My research has led to the conclusions I hold and the stand I now take. My initial research (1986-1989) included interviews with over 2,400 individuals (700 couples and 1,000 singles). Over the last 30 years I have worked with over 35,000 couples and a growing number of singles. During that time I have invested approximately 60,000 hours investigating what does not work in relationships, and what we can do about it. Between 1990 and 1993, I tested my findings with over 2,000 individuals and then tracked the results of over 100 couples that followed my advice over a period of five years. These experiences changed my life direction completely.

At the core of relationship dynamics I explored spirit and the nature of creative expression with others. This has lead to the development of new employee selection criteria and the optimization of teams in organizations, the facilitation of Co-Creative relationships (for both singles and couples), and the exploration of the impact of Parents and Teachers upon children. During this process it became clear there is a higher force at work in manifesting Co-Creative relationships. The goal therefore became to learn how to amplify the positive effects of Co-Creative partnerships. It became all about what makes it possible to be in Co-Creative relationships and how we can generate them quickly. We need to be able to operate in an authentic way with others possessing similar capabilities and engage creative projects that can instigate mutual learning opportunities. This has resulted in the development of 12 Higher Alignment Relationship Skills. This led me to use these principles in all of my relationships, which has provided feedback and clarification that have improved the work over the years.

The research suggests that inner guidance and intuition arise naturally as we progress in our ability to manifest Higher Alignment Relationship Skills. We can now test and validate these skills quickly, and from the nature of your relationships confirm whether you are primarily learning Gender Identity, Individuation, Connection or Co-Creative Skills. It appears to be no accident that our inner development mirrors the self-acceptance of our Creative Being. It is also not accidental that Intuitive skills integrate our inner and outer being, mirroring our inner and outer worlds, which provide the feedback loops that accelerate our conscious development.

While we have made the first steps in acknowledging that the unfinished business of our childhood distorts our attractions and directs our desires, we seem to be unclear about how our drive for success increases our opportunities for individuation at the cost of our relationships. Instead, many professionals appear to be more interested in dysfunctional or pathological behavior than discovering the support infrastructure for enlightened relationships. My focus has not only been discovering the reasons why we are not in great relationships, but developing a comprehensive way to engage the fears and desires that keep us from meeting each other in an open way. We best accomplish this by honoring the Autonomy of all participants, who are encouraged to take breaks to fully assimilate the experience of this process.

Not A Guru, Not A Cult

On the other hand, it is equally distressing when others idealize me or treat me as a guru because this is the age of egalitarianism. I take this as a failure on my part to have them acknowledge their own power in creating the truth of their experience. While I do not seek these affirmations, I find that many seek the answers in others because they need simple external solutions. The more they make me their source, the less I can engage them in a Co-Creative manner, which is the purpose of this work. I also realize that the more I am initially elevated, the more they will need to pull me down and dethrone me when they start to grow. We work to minimize this idealization process though the Advanced Defensive Healing and Healing Idealization courses.

Another problem I run into is others thinking that a mentor or teacher position works best. I personally find these ways of thinking hierarchical and ineffective in partnership dynamics. This is true to the degree that you choose my approach over your approach without thinking it through and making it your own process. Thinking, being and knowing how to do it the best way for you is all that interests me. What I challenge most in others is acting in unconscious ways, learned from parents. I encourage everyone to make mistakes and learn what works for them first and foremost. If this means you have to go out and consciously do the opposite of what I recommend, then I am all for it if it frees you from your fixed positions. Finally, I would like to acknowledge that our group embraces diversity, supports everyone becoming spokespersons, and embraces the reality that we all are challenged to be more of ourselves each day.

Influences

One source of inspiration for this work has come from the amazing enlightened couples I initially researched and through the others I supported in creating co-creative relationships. My own background with the Alice Bailey work (particularly Esoteric Psychology II or The Seven Rays of Life: A Compilation) helped enormously in organizing the creative qualities and dynamics. While the Michael system is a complementary exposition of seven creative expressions on two levels, the Bailey system had 3 to 5 levels and a larger purpose and focus that I really appreciated. The downside of the Alice Bailey work is that much of it is over-involved and requires thinking in depth, which, for many individuals is overwhelming. Overall, I ended up using some of the names from the Michael System (Essence and Personality: The Michael Handbook by Jose Stevens, Ph.D. and Simon Warwick Smith) to describe these differences, especially regarding the instinctive factors.

JP Van Hulle was instrumental as a mentor in claiming my power to name my experience. Michael D. Robbins, Ph.D. in the Tapestry of the Gods series was very helpful in clarifying the structure of human experience. He founded the University of Seven Rays, which has further developed the Alice Bailey work. I would also be the first to acknowledge the groundbreaking work of Robert Assagioli, M.D., as my approach parallels Psychosynthesis. Real world testing and refining of this information has led to serious deviations from its previous presentations. In all the preceding books, I have been pushing the limits as an open investigator and establishing real world testing has superseded some of those works in order to make it more useful. For this reason, I do not want to misrepresent this as another author’s thinking, as it has been an evolutionary process for me over these years.

Harville Hendrix’ books are core reading for those working on releasing themselves from parental patterns. Unfortunately, I find this direction to be a waste of effort as we do not need to go back to resolve parental patterns unless we have the same creative patterns as our parents. John Grey has commercialized and popularized gender based defensive identity skills with his Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus books. His explanations were attempts to represent some aspects of our defensive patterns, but they were not complete. The problem is that Defenses are much more complicated and their interactions predictable only if we understand that they are essentially compromised perceptions. Grey’s work matches a subsection in our defensive healing work.

Also, David Deide tried to represent the differences in defensive patterns, and particularly encouraged men to use their gender identity perceptions to reinforce their intellectual predispositions. This will help approximately fifty percent of the population. One of the real reasons why these defensive orientations did not have more of a transformational effect is because no one understood the impact of Objectification, Subjectification and Idealization on defensive patterns. These are the true obstacles to great relationships. It is our misperception of what is going on that not only creates the confusion, but reinforces our neediness and aversion to enmeshment.

In many ways I have tested and supplemented ideas such as Frank Sulloway’s work on birth order with original research I have performed. I recommend all of these books as introductions that do a much better job talking about unconscious attractions then I am interested in explaining (see Attractions). The Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav is the best introduction to our Creative Nature and possibilities I have found. Current science has vastly changed the way we talk about relationships because now we discuss relationships in terms of neurotransmitters and their receptors. I feel that I have pioneered real world applications of how our patterns work or do not work with others. My goal has been to make the dynamics of relationships more transparent.

Current Contributions

My focus has been to go deeper and identify the patterns that sabotage our relationships. Explaining Pretense and Defense structures so individuals could balance themselves and heal was the first unique contribution I made to the process. It provides insights as to why people respond and interact in ways that provide incentives for others to participate or to protect themselves from the intrusions of others. The second contribution is discovering the principles of attraction and why the best partner possibilities are avoided. The third contribution is the way we sabotage our unique, Creative Expression because we do not love ourselves. Usually this is because we do not acknowledge ourselves as a contributor or see ourselves as a net benefit to the universe.

There are seven Creative combinations on 3 levels, which have been tested and validated by Higher Alignment. The original source of these creative concepts is Helena Blavatsky, Alice Bailey and the Michael System. We will clarify these concepts for modern Humanity, showing how they integrate and express themselves uniquely. Each human possesses qualities that define our inner creative polarities and choices. We can either express the best in our Self, or the worst. When we make creative assessments we use these positive or negative indicators to validate our seeing. This seeing begins within ourselves, and when it becomes clear we can use it to serve others.

Until we acknowledge ourselves and the relationship to ourselves, it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to build skills with others. In Higher Alignment, we have defined twelve common Skills that provide doorways for deepening to relationships. Most individuals have activated only one to three of them. Other contributions are the Common Neutral Ground, which is our way of optimally connecting with others in a conscious manner so that our personal stuff does not trigger our partner and their personal stuff does not trigger us.

With these consciousness tools, it allows us to connect with others in ways that are multi-dimensional and utilize the difference in our Modalities (Sensations, Feelings, Thoughts, Emotions and Intuition) to build a greater unity. Some would say my work on distinguishing Feelings from Emotions is an original contribution, but this comes from the Alice Bailey work, even though it is not fully articulated. What is original about these ‘Modalities’ is how they are paired up to create different problems in relationship, when we are unable to distinguish them from each other. This reflects the distortions of Objectification, Subjectification and Idealization, which the Bailey work refers to as being Maya, Illusion and Glamour. Another aspect of the Modalities that we uniquely talk about is how repression can either be an overdoing or underdoing, or both overdoing and underdoing, depending on the way we were traumatized growing up. The seventh contribution is how to teach these skills and provide the means to validate our experience. Over time I have been refining these contributions and will continue to expand this body of work to serve a greater number of people. The process of teaching and calibrating to the inner experiences of others we call Inner Seeing. Currently, the work only serves those who are self-reflective and aware of themselves as creative contributors in the world.

Inspirations

Many others have inspired me and have contributed ideas to my work such as Ken Wilber’s perspective about Holons and the evolution of consciousness, or Torkom Saraydarian’s perspective on the cost of premature or inappropriate sexuality. His perspective of women as the hope of the future is very uplifting. I have also been inspired by the Agni Yoga teachings by Helena Roerich and this shows up most powerfully in the levels and naming of Motives, Attractions and Relationships Skills. I have adapted and changed the ideas of JP Van Hulle and Aaron Christeaan of the Michael Education Foundation about soul ages to reflect more of the patterns observed in real life. It should be also noted that much of my work on Body Types and Communication Process are both an expansion of and an abbreviated list originating with Gurdjieff.

Ultimately, the Higher Alignment material has been synthesized by testing and validating many different ideas. It breaks new ground with Creative Intelligences (particularly actualization levels and sources of growth), Defensive distortions and facades, Pretenses, and Imprinting patterns. It has come to the point that it is not the information that is important, but rather the process of healing and building new skills. This fits with Peter Drucker’s view that the information age ended in 1995, for it is my observation that we are currently in the Relationship Age. This is the age where the power of inter-relationships will be felt, understood and finally appreciated. It is time now to reduce our Attachments to Pretenses and Defenses to learn to engage others in a Common Neutral Ground. May we all become empowered sources in this, the Age of Relationships.