Let There Be Us: A Journey into Yourself

By JC Ramos Paulino

At some point in your life, the time arrives when you ask yourself, What am I doing here? Or Who am I? You may get there via success—Now what? pops up in your head after you are done raising the kids and have sent them off to college. Or you may get there via pain and suffering—What is the meaning behind all this? Why keep going?

If the time has arrived for you to understand yourself, life and others, LET THERE BE US is the book for you. Let There Be Us is a modern guide to the total understanding of yourself and the next step in your evolution. After understanding you, comprehension of life and others follows. The book is designed for the pragmatic western mind. It features creative allegories and practical day-to-day examples to help you create your best reality.

The book dives into Why are you here, and the purpose behind the activity of life. The chapter Identity and Reality reveals how your subconscious identity filters your perception of people and events to match the internal sense of who you are. Self-awareness and Time explains the powerful transformation you experienced when you grasped the concept of time at an early age. The three components of your identity, Self-awareness, Self-definition, and Self-image are discussed next. What are "evolutionary minds?" And what are the two classes of consciousness operating in your body? The powerful concept of "conscious attention" is introduced next before tackling Your Present Moment and the difference between the actual now and your pseudo present time. In The Structure of your Self-image, the blueprint of your model of reality is broken down piece by piece, opening the door to its mastery. The chapter Your True Nature explains the truth behind your sense of identity and how to expand the boundaries of the self.

Let There Be Us is a journey into yourself. It guides you before the gates of the next chapter in your evolution. Read this book. Mastery of your conscious attention awaits.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098312947

Book preview

Let There Be Us

A Journey into Yourself

JC Ramos Paulino

ISBN (Print Edition): 978-1-09831-293-0

ISBN (eBook Edition): 978-1-09831-294-7

© 2020. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This book is dedicated to all of us.

Welcome to the next chapter.

JC Ramos Paulino

Table of Contents

The Inward Journey

A Little Note about the Mind

Why Are You Here?

Starting Our Journey into the Self

Emotional Responses as a Guiding System

Evolving

Growth versus Success and Failure

Identifying Areas of Growth

Off the Page, into Your Life—Spotting Growth

The Land with No Mirrors

Identity and Reality

Experienced Reality

Roles as Subcategories of Identity

Understanding Identity

Conditioning and Genetics

Understanding Roles

Roles and Your State of Mind

Validation and Meaning

Your Fight-or-Flight Responses, Avoiding or Engaging

Roles, Purpose, and Perception

What Enters Your Conscious Attention

Off the Page, into Your Life—Validating Identity

The Crying Lake

Your Self-Awareness and the Concept of Time

The Rise of Self-Awareness

Meet Grunk

Off the Page, into Your Life—Increasing Your Sense of Reality About Others

No Such Thing as a Hand

Your Self-Awareness, Your Self-Definition, and Your Self-Image

Classes of Consciousness

Your Mind Activities

Your Self-Image and Your Self-Definition

Off the Page, into Your Life—Increasing Appreciation for Your Subconscious Mind

Your Mind, Your Life

The Relationship Between Your Mind and Body

The Pianist behind the Music of Your Life

Off the Page, into Your Life—Your Experienced Reality

Clouds in My Sky

Your Present Moment

The Two Sides of Your Present Moment—Total Effect and Total Cause

Where Does Your Present Moment Come From?

Where is Your Present Moment Going?

Off the Page, into Your Life—Halting Your Pseudo Time

Mastering the Self

Mastering Life

Off the Page, into Your Life—Keeping Your Cool

The Structure of Your Self-Image

Mental Structures in Your Self-Image

Identity as the Driving Factor in Your Life

Mental Structures

Why Most of Your Identity is Subconscious

Where is Your Mental Content before it is Called Upon?

Why Does Your Mental Content Display as either Conscious or Subconscious?

Off the Page, into Your Life—Bringing Conscious Attention into Your Subconscious Reactions

Creating Your Reality

Creating Your Best Reality

Making it Real

Conscious Attention versus Passive Attention

Off the Page, into Your Life—Activating Identity Consciously

Pursuing Growth

Growing While Pursuing Your Desires

How to Spot What You Need to Change

How Much Growth is Needed?

Your Happiness and Your Relationships

Your True Nature

When You Need a Hand, Say Hello

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Appendix

Spotting Growth

Validating Identity

Increasing Your Sense of Reality About Others

Increasing Appreciation for Your Subconscious Mind

Your Experienced Reality

Halting Your Pseudo Time

Keeping Your Cool

Bringing Conscious Attention into Your Subconscious Reactions

Activating Identity Consciously

The Inward Journey

Who are you, really? Are you your name, your social security number, and your date of birth? Are you your appearance? The things you know or the possessions you have? Could it be that you are your goals and dreams, or the bonds you have developed with people you love? Is it your history—where you’ve been and what you’ve done?

And why are you here? What is moving you forward? What is pushing you along?

You get up every morning and go. You did it yesterday; you did it today; you can be certain you’ll try again tomorrow. You deal with whatever life throws at you. You keep on going. You strive.

There are days when you feel tired—exhausted, actually. The next step takes everything you’ve got. But you keep moving. There are rare moments when it all seems worth it, whether it’s a small victory or a big achievement. In the midst of the daily grind, have you ever stopped and asked: What am I really after?

There is a journey of inward growth toward discovery and nourishment, toward purpose and meaning.

Like a sprouting seed, you must grow your roots deep to sustain the stem that is developing upward in the external world. The deeper your internal roots grow, the taller your tree stands on this Earth, reaching out toward the heavens and going up as far as your nature decides. Down there and up here, there is understanding, and there is knowing.

Let us embark on this journey together, this journey into the self. Bring your best hopes and dreams with you. I think you’ll be excited to see where you end up. Master the self, and you will master life; know yourself, and you will know the universe.

A Little Note about the Mind

Your fantastic mind changes, grows or expands when it comes across new concepts.

Learning and understanding new concepts is like adding new software onto your computer. If you install Microsoft Word, your laptop can perform more tasks for you; it grows into a more powerful tool with the new addition. The more useful the software, the more powerful it is. Before you add software, the computer is just a tool with potential. You could own the latest laptop featuring impressive processing capabilities, but if you don’t install the software you need—and learn to use it—then you’ll never realize the benefits of owning the device. Unlike a laptop with its limited storage space, however, your mind’s potential knows no bounds. The more you put into it, the more it grows.

New concepts give your mind an expanded framework of what is possible. They unlock the next layer of reality. For instance, we’ll examine how your mind grasped the concept of time in early childhood. That forever changed the way you perceive reality, yourself, and others.

Once realized, a new concept has the tendency to generate change within you and the world. Cavemen, for example, did not know the concept of radio waves. Sure, radio waves existed back then. But humanity was thousands of years away from being ready to harness them for our benefit. Thus, cavemen never attempted to build radios. People built radios after we learned the concept of the existence of radio waves. Something similar occurred with the concept of electricity, not to mention the scientific growth sparked by the theory of gravity.

Some concepts will speak to you personally. By shifting viewpoints and allowing perception to flow, new worlds open up. And, yes, your mind has a limitless capacity for concepts! As you read this book, watch out for new ideas. Take a moment to observe how they transform the possibilities around the self. That is when these concepts are ripe for you: when you are ready for them.

Why Are You Here?

Starting Our Journey into the Self

There are times when life feels like a relentless parade of difficulties. They keep coming at you out of nowhere—the unappreciative boss, the jerk co-worker, the loud neighbor. Economic roller coasters and exhausting politics. Your unsatisfactory relationship with your significant other. The obnoxious family member, the ungrateful children, the relentless aging process. And that’s when things are normal.

On the really bad days, we feel tired. We are sick of feeling alone and not having real friends. We are sick of feeling exhausted and drained of energy. We are sick of not knowing the best thing to do next. Everything may look great on the outside (or on social media), but there are times we all feel like total failures. And we spend way too much energy trying to keep others from realizing that.

Then again, incredibly enough, you’ve had flashes in the past when it all felt great! Everything was going your way for a while. Those were the good days, when life was full of promise. Good news flowed in choreographed sequence to a climax. Maybe your efforts finally paid off, and you got that degree you had been dreaming of, or maybe you moved into a fantastic new home. Perhaps you had a significant breakthrough in your career or found out that the person you liked so much liked you back.

In moments like that, your potential and creativity are at their peak. The energy in your body is abundant—contagious enthusiasm pours out of you! Those good periods in life make everything worth it.

Have you ever wondered why you have your ups and downs? What sparks the parades of bad circumstances or the sequences of good results? Maybe your life is meant to forever be a roller coaster…or maybe there’s a pattern. If you cannot stop the bad times when they come, were you truly in control when the good ones came along? What are you doing here? What is happening to you? On the journey into the self, this is our first stop.

Emotional Responses as a Guiding System

Imagine a scrambled Rubik’s Cube, that popular puzzle toy with six faces of various colors. Imagine for a moment that all the blue pieces spread throughout the cube—all nine of them—suddenly became conscious and self-aware, just like you and me. They woke up one day and found themselves alive in a universe full of other pieces that looked like them. Except that most of their neighboring pieces were of a different color.

Often, as the blue pieces go on living their lives, a hand of destiny comes along and rotates parts of the cube. It shifts the blue pieces’ landscape. Familiar pieces around them are gone; new ones take their places. The circumstances of the blue pieces’ lives have changed. These unknown forces moving the cube are explained away by some of the blue pieces—perhaps it’s desire, luck, coincidence, or destiny, they suggest. Some of the wiser blue pieces are known and respected for their wisdom. They call these constant changes natural law, luck, or the way life is. Often, the end result of these random movements confirms those beliefs, and other times, their life chaos doesn’t make any sense at all.

As it goes through life, sometimes, a side of a blue piece lands next to another blue piece. And that feels good, subconsciously good. It feels like, I would like it if that side of me stays that way. It is a feeling of well-being. It may not be expressed with words or even fully be noticed.

More often, though, a side of the blue piece lands next to a piece of a different color. And that feels unsatisfying and subconsciously unfulfilling. It feels like, I should keep moving.

How each blue piece feels at any given moment may seem random to an observer as their feelings don’t explain what is going on…that is, until the observer realizes the connection between all of the different-colored pieces. Then she discovers what life—i.e., the hand of destiny—is trying to do. It is working to bring all the blue pieces together. It is trying to solve the entire puzzle across all six faces. Solving the complete puzzle is the ultimate purpose, and landing next to another blue piece is a step closer to fulfilling that purpose.

When you are closing in on your purpose as a human being, life feels good. When you stray, it feels all wrong. Like each separate piece in a Rubik’s Cube, you are an element of something bigger—you are an individual fragment of a greater whole. Like each finger in a hand, there is a harmony to your individual and collective movements. And there is a single overarching purpose that connects your life and the lives of people around you. That includes people whose activities and ideas are totally different from yours. They are part of the puzzle, too, perhaps on the opposite side of the cube. Their ultimate success in fulfilling their underlying purpose means that you will succeed as well. The entire puzzle will be solved.

If you were able to observe what the cosmos is doing, you would come to realize what fulfills you (what makes you feel connected to a deeper purpose) and what makes you feel empty (disconnected from it). This purpose is already unfolding around you. From this connection (or disconnection), you draw meaning.

This purpose of the cosmos is reflected in the activity of nature all around you. You and everything else in nature are the outcome of that activity, the outcome of life and its purpose. The continuation of that activity in yourself is the natural path of this purpose.

All that said, what something is doing something is different from why it is doing it.

A group of people may be busy for weeks building a bridge across a river. That is what they are doing. They want their families to be able to cross safely from one side of the river to the other. That is why they are building a bridge. So, what are life and the cosmos doing right now? The same thing they have been doing for millions of years, ever since the beginning.

Evolving

The universe, in its current stage, is evolving, growing, and expanding. The purpose behind life’s activity is evolution and growth. In addition to whatever individual goals you may have, the underlying purpose of your existence is to grow. Not merely to survive and persevere, no, but to evolve and grow. Experiencing growth enlivens every cell in your body.

Your overarching purpose is to grow, and your emotions are a guiding system to that aim.

When you are growing, it feels good. Keep going! When you are stagnant, it feels wrong. Change!

Take a moment to reflect on the periods of your life when everything felt stuck. You’ll find that these periods have something in common: you were not growing. You were stagnant. In some cases, you may have even been regressing. Now, reflect on those occasions when life felt good. During the good times, you were growing and expanding in one or more aspects of your life. In some cases, the growth manifested in the achievement of a goal, in success. When you look beyond the changing circumstances and the lucky or unlucky breaks, you’ll find that growth, stagnation, or decay is the final why at the end of the story.

Growth or stagnation fuels your state of mind. Each triggers aspects of your self-image related to your success or failure. We’ll discuss later in detail how this happens. For now, we’ll say that features of your subconscious influence your perception of reality. They create specific states of mind and impact how you engage in activities.

Growth includes at least three phases:

Physical.

Emotional.

Intellectual.

Growth in any of these phases will give you a measure of pleasure.

Physical growth includes the development and nurturing of your body. It includes what contributes to it, like your health, possessions, and finances.

Emotional growth includes your relationships, psychological health, and spiritual development. Intellectual growth includes the knowledge and skills you acquire. These three areas combine to give you a spectrum of activities, a field of play for the game of life.

Growth versus Success and Failure

Growth is different from success: success is the manifestation of growth, and failure is an opportunity for both. Winning and losing are not automatically rewarding or depressing activities.

For instance, imagine you are in your mid-fifties. You are already retired due to a combination of financial success but (unfortunately) poor health. You decide to walk to a nearby park every afternoon to play chess for an hour. Sure, you love chess. But this is about more than chess—it’s your reason to walk for twenty minutes to the park and then back home, as your doctor suggested. The relative skill level of chess players in the area is remarkably low, and you demolish everyone who plays with you at the park. No one manages to keep it an interesting game past the tenth move. By the end of the second week, you are bored with this playing-chess-at-the-park business, so you decide to find a different way to satisfy your walking goals. In this scenario, winning all the time proved unsatisfying. There was no growth. The feeling of boredom was a cue that change was needed despite all the wins.

On the other hand, imagine you are in your mid-twenties. You become fascinated with chess after reading an online article about Bobby Fischer, and you join a local club and begin playing chess every weekend. The players at the club are quite good. At first, you get soundly beaten every time you play, but you are getting better and better with each passing weekend. Everybody at the club notices your progress. You even managed a draw against a very strong player last week! The instructors and your fellow players are beginning to commend you. Out of the blue, the club director invites you to represent the club at a friendly tournament for novices. Your strong third-place finish surprises even you. Everybody congratulates you. The pride and satisfaction you feel inside your chest for a few weeks is hard to describe. Your hard work paid off, and you have a promising future in chess.

In this second scenario, it would be inaccurate to say that losing all the time was motivating—it was the rewarding sensation of growth that fueled you. You haven’t experienced much success yet, but you have certainly enjoyed great growth.

It doesn’t matter where you started in life: rich or poor, woman or man, white or black. It matters whether you are growing or not. It doesn’t matter what you accomplished or failed to accomplish earlier in your life. It matters that you are growing—now.

Stagnation is the beginning of death. It is the signal that invites the symptoms of dying and misfortune into your life. The symptoms of stagnation are a warning sign that growth is needed.

Identifying Areas of Growth

Emotions are your guidance system. They point you in the direction of fulfilling your individual purpose, and your individual purpose harmonizes you with the rest of life that is unfolding around you. Your individual purpose reveals your uniqueness. It elevates you. It maximizes your value to others. That’s the best place where you could live, and your emotions guide you there: happy or depressed means either keep going or change. Think of