Science can demonstrate that certain physical characteristics are genetically encoded in an individual’s DNA. One person’s blue eyes and another’s brown eyes can be traced to certain genetic configurations. Skin, scales, feathers, and hair, as well as thousands of other physical traits, can be explained in terms of inherited genetic material.
But what about instincts, social behaviors, human motives? Where do they come from?
I used to raise pigs as pets and observed that they were naturally adept at building shelters. That’s probably where The Three Little Pigs story comes from: the first little pig built his house of straw, the second little pig built his house of sticks, and the third little pig built his house of bricks. I think that last construction may have been a little creative license on the part of some storyteller. But pigs really do build shelters, and they are quite good at it.
I had a sow named Violet that could turn a soft piece of ground and a brush pile into a pig shelter in a few hours. She was a regular beaver. She’d drag branches and mouthfuls of sod together in a pile, and then she’d climb up on the pile and roll it flat. Then she’d drag on a few more branches and more mouthfuls of sod and roll it flat again.
At first I thought she was building a foundation, which would have been a mark of higher intelligence. Foundations are really a human invention. If you are doing an archeological excavation and you strike something that looks like a foundation, that’s pay dirt. Foundations are evidence that a crossover has occurred from instinctive behavior to intelligent behavior. This applies not only to building shelters; it also applies to building lives.
Anyhow, the pig was building a shelter; she was just doing it from the top down. The matted pile of sticks and sod was her roof. Once it seemed satisfactory to her, she used her nose to lift the edge and crawled under the matted pile of brush. And then she stood up with the roof bending to the curve of her back and proceeded to push up dirt-pile-walls in a circle just slightly smaller than the diameter of her roof. Finally when the piles were a foot or so tall, she knelt down on her knees again and let the dome roof rest on the walls. I wondered if I wasn’t looking at the natural archetype for cathedrals and capitol buildings.
She was very systematic. In a matter of an afternoon she finished a perfect one-pig-wide dome with a matted, waterproof roof over her head, and she built most of it from the inside!
I found it interesting that there was no exit, no door, although she could have easily made one. At first, I thought this was a mistake, but then if you are giving birth to 12 baby pigs that you want to keep track of, which she did a few hours later, you could appreciate her door-less design.
Violet had come from a commercial pig farm and had been born and raised in a concrete barn. How to build a shelter was not something she had learned from another pig; it was purely a product of instinct. I’m sure that the width of her snout and the color of her eyes were determined by genetic factors, DNA combinations. But her knowledge of shelters? Where did that come from? Was it an evolved behavior developed over many generations by natural selection, stored somehow in a deep level of …what?
Gimme Shelter
When I was a kid I used to build huts all of the time. I think it must be a stage that kids go through in their development. Did you ever build tents out of blankets and chairs in the middle of the living room? It is a common, culturally independent behavior. It doesn’t matter if your parents are Asian, Indian, Bedouin or whatever; there is a developmental stage, usually around the age of 4, when you desire to crawl under something. Shelter building is an instinctual echo within consciousness.
Go to an area that has experienced a war or a natural calamity, and you will see lots of shelter building. This instinctive behavior has been triggered. Even in the shock of some terrible tragedy, with logical thinking and reasoning shutting down, even in this totally overwhelmed condition, you’ll see people tipping up a piece of cardboard or spreading out some plastic to create shelter. There’s really not a lot of technical know-how needed to build a shelter. The urge is a deeply ingrained instinct—a nesting behavior that bridges the gap between self-preservation and the most elementary social behavior, sexual reproduction.
Watching Violet build her house and watching people’s reaction to disaster has left me wondering if there is not some collective, transcendent consciousness counterpart that forwards instincts the same way that physical genes forward structural blueprints. Collective consciousness. What an amazing concept! It hints of magic, religion, evolution, maybe even an unfolding cosmic design. That’s the positive side.
On the negative side, it raises the possibility that we might be so influenced by the past that we fail to negotiate the future. Modeling the experiences of the past, even if they arise from something as remarkable and mysterious as a collective consciousness, is about as conservative as you can get. If it worked for granddad, then it will work for me. This is actually a pretty safe stepping-off point for a philosophy, but it doesn’t take into account that the issues that granddad confronted successfully are no longer part of the challenge of living.
In the ‘60s, I did the hippie drop-out thing and returned to the land. The plan was to be self-sufficient, to grow my own food, build my own house, survive by my own efforts. You know something? It was the easiest thing I ever did. I discovered that all the problems of what to grow, when to plant, how to build had been solved for a hundred years. I had shelter, plenty to eat, and was bored to death. I felt I was on a path to extinction. Thriving did not necessarily mean that I was evolving which, when you get down to it, seems to be the goal of life.
I used to tell a story about a tropical rodent that evolved during the age of the dinosaur. This little quadruped was unique, because it was covered with thin, single-quilled feathers that you and I call hair.
Hair in the tropics was not a good idea; it didn’t solve any existing environmental problems. In fact, it was a liability. The poor creature had to live underground and come out only at night, because its hair prevented it from dissipating body heat. Of course, it avoided a lot of cold-blooded predators that hunted in the heat of the day, but overall, scales and thick hide were the fashion of the day.
It’s not hard to imagine the great rulers of the Jurassic swamps looking at the small, hairy rodent burrowing into the ground, and hear them laughing. Hair! Living underground! What a freak!
Then it started to snow. A good taxonomy text will tell you the rest of the story. Rodents survived the ice age; dinosaurs didn’t.
Growing hair was actually pre-adaptive evolution. It didn’t arise from past experience, or even from present experience, but was a mutation that occurred before the snows started. Call it dumb luck if you want to, but having hair and the ability to burrow prepared the ancestor of the Muridae family for the future. If there is some log of collective consciousness that is dutifully recording the experiences of life and designing instincts for the next generation, this mouse started a new chapter.
Pre-adaptive evolution was the beginning of intelligence. Maybe fur was just a serendipitous mutation in its first instance, but it added the lesson to the collective consciousness that sometimes you survive by breaking the patterns of the past. In that cosmic moment, life on this planet began to move beyond instincts into an exploration of intelligence—an exploration of choices and decisions and their consequences. In the broad scheme of things, instincts were being quietly usurped by an intelligence that could predict, develop new abilities, and restructure its behavior to thrive in the times ahead.
If the dinosaurs had had more intelligence rather than instincts, they might have survived the Ice Age wearing mouse-skin coats. The tool the dinosaurs lacked was Avatar.
The more sentient creatures become, the more self-designing they become. Self-designing is a fantastic ability. When you couple intelligence with self-designing, you awaken a power that is not only capable of coping with the future, it is capable of shaping the future.
Tens of thousands of Avatars are self-designing the qualities that will pre-adapt them to a social climate change that is just beginning. They are developing social hair—the ability to see others compassionately, the ability to trust, the ability to share, the ability to act rationally in service to others.
An enlightened rain is beginning to fall.
The Avatar materials are designed and intended to be an effective means for inspiring the realizations and changes that will move you toward a stable spiritual awakening. They should be considered as means (tools), rather than doctrines.
How do you achieve enlightenment?
Siddhartha Gautama lived in the forest, and then he moved to the city, lived there for a while, and then he moved to a mountain, lived there for a while, and then he moved to a river and lived beside the river for a while. Finally, under a banyan tree, he achieved a state of perfect enlightenment, and was henceforth called the Buddha.
So it seems to me that the path is pretty simple. First you live in the forest, then move to the city, then go live on a mountain, then live along a river, and then look for a banyan tree.
No? Then I guess it wasn’t where Buddha was living that was important. What was important was that certain realizations and transformations were happening to him that culminated in his enlightenment. How does a spiritual path bring about these realizations and transformations leading to enlightenment?
Most spiritual paths employ various instructions, teaching techniques, rituals, and individual practices. Together these constitute the tools of a spiritual path. Some paths are more effective than others, and some paths are more personally suited to some mindsets than others. If a tool is used properly, it either produces the expected results or it doesn’t. Of course, tools have other qualifying factors: ease of use, speed of result, effort involved, cost involved, and in some cases, avoidance of collateral damage.
The Avatar tools rate favorably in all categories and are remarkably effective considering the general mental condition of the people to which they are being introduced.
If you examine the current state of the world, you will find that most people are reacting according to deeply indoctrinated beliefs. Some will argue that they are not reacting and are making free will choices, but the truth is that past conclusions and old fears make most of their decisions. Nearly everyone is operating according to someone else’s rules rather than their own intuitive principles. People live in what was, and they selectively perceive only enough of the present to excite their conclusions about things. The major aspiration is to be right rather than to be aware.
In this compulsive commerce of approval, most interactions are consciously or unconsciously manipulative. Most are governed by praise (pleasure) or criticism (pain). What people do and say to each other creates reactions. If the experience of the reaction is considered pleasurable, attachment develops. If the experience of the reactions is considered painful, resistance develops.
The same experience may affect different people differently. People’s considerations of what is painful and what is pleasurable follow patterns created by their beliefs and memories of past experiences. If you traced the considerations of pain and pleasure all the way back to their roots, you would most likely find them associated with survival concerns: food, shelter, and reproduction.
At the present time, most of human consciousness operates like a roll of exposed film. It seldom pictures the world moment to moment as it is, but carries around pictures of what the world was like. Individuals wrestle with the fears and sufferings of the past-obstructions that rightly should be assigned to history and left there.
So this is how we begin.
The sections of Avatar are designed to encourage the realizations and changes that a person must go through to move from a life of indoctrinated responses into a life of living deliberately. The necessary realizations and changes are not the same for everyone.
Also the realizations and changes are not a straight line or an exact series of steps. Instead, they follow a winding path of necessarily unique experiences that sometimes nurture the ego self, sometimes a compassionate self, and slowly or suddenly, arrive at an experience of spiritual self. It may sound like a linear process, but it seldom is.
Yes, word lessons can be presented as a straight path to understanding enlightenment, chapter following chapter, but world lessons wander; life stops to explore. It loses it place. It falls down, runs into walls, sheds tears, and then has a good laugh as it gets up and brushes itself off. If only perfect people could experience enlightenment, very few would arrive.
Progress does not always mean that you are moving in the direction of being more compassionate, righteous, or spiritual. The unique experience you need might be painful or destructive. Sometimes the next lesson is negative, or ego strengthening, or overwhelming. Unless you are able to live a cloister life, your spiritual tools need to work on practical matters as well as metaphysical matters.
As an aside, religions tend to stall out around the high points of a spiritual path. These hesitations can be obstructions to moving forward. Sometimes a parishioner has to fall into sin and be excommunicated before he or she can move on. The last step before personal freedom may be to commit an unpardonable sin in your faith. The transgressions, honestly confronted, transform your judgments into compassion and empathy for others: Someone who always acts kindly has trouble understanding someone who fails to act kindly; not doing good might seem unforgivable to someone who always does good.
Next I am going to take you through the sections of Avatar one by one and roughly describe the changes that are expected to occur in each section. But let me caution you, reading about these changes, even in detail, is not the same as experiencing them.
Section I of Avatar is called ReSurfacing. It refers to the action of disentangling you from your creations; it is an awakening of interested self-awareness. This section could be called a self-discovery course. It is waking you up from the movie you were lost in.
ReSurfacing reminds people that there is a difference between the experience of self and the experience the self is having. Later on the path, these two may again merge, but at this level of awakening the direction is to realize that there is a difference between the perceiver and the perception. There is a difference between one’s self and one’s role model. There is a difference between acting deliberately and reacting. There is a difference between you and your problems.
The fundamental change that occurs on ReSurfacing is a deepening of the experience of “I am.” This is a transformation from, “Oh sure, I am,” to “Oh my God, I am. I really am.” This is an “I am” that is discovering personal responsibility. This opens the door to powerful realizations that break the grip of indoctrinated beliefs. Experiencing “I am” as something more than a mental concept causes a transformation and a healing. Personal responsibility replaces robotic reactions to authority. Suddenly you can observe and choose how, or even if, you will act. When somebody talks about Avatar as a self-discovery course, they’re talking about this level of realization and change.
Section II of Avatar is self-empowerment training. The prerequisite to doing Section II is that on ReSurfacing you discovered a real self to empower.
All suffering arises from mental processes, in particular from beliefs and judgments. Resistance to what is inevitable produces suffering. It is no surprise that certain philosophies and religions consider life to be suffering. They don’t have an effective technology to handle mental resistance. The best they can do is to still the mind by discipline; when the mind is still, the suffering ceased, but so too do the lessons conveyed by suffering.
Section II is a modern approach to achieving control over the mind; there is more subtly to the mind than turning it off and on. This control is such an unusual accomplishment that many people, until they experience it, do not believe it can be done. But it can, and it is part of the changes that happens on Section II of Avatar.
After you sort out who you are and how your mind operates, the next issue is what can you deliberately create?
Section II is where the path begins to wind. You might take a detour into the material world. Ego development is built into the exercises in order to prepare for the next transformation. After the experience of “I am,” the next experience on the path is, “And I’m pretty darned cool.” Section II removes your limitations and releases your creative powers. Your first response will probably be to create something that you have long desired. This is the ultimate pleasure of the ego, to create exactly what one wants.
Why, you might ask, would Avatar encourage the development of the ego when we know the ego is the source of many difficulties in the world? The answer is that it is the next necessary experience that you need to integrate. The ego is an area that needs to be explored without judgment.
Remember, sometimes it is the egotistic efforts at self-aggrandizement that produce some of our greatest cultural treasures. Developing the ego is a necessary rite of passage to transcending the ego. If your ego fails to flower, there is no harvest, and no further spiritual growth.
The main change on Section II is achieving a balance in your life. If you have experienced unhappiness, you can create happiness. If it you have experienced failure, you can experience success. If you have experienced feeling submissive, you can balance it with feeling dominant. The Section II Source List processes and Reality Creation processes afford an ethical way for you to achieve this balance.
Restoring balance is the real goal of self-empowerment. You could say that Section II puts you on the route to achieving karmic balance with the universe; whatever twists and turns your spiritual path has taken, or needs to take, the balance can be restored with the Section II tools.
On to Section III, the first rays of self-awareness are often paralyzing; they tend to brightly illuminate your shame and guilt, rather than your deeper nature. This changes with the initiation of Section III; self-awareness becomes functional, compassionate, and empowering.
The Section III rundowns are a journey inward to unlimited self. They bring you into the space that has the power to define self. The rundowns identify and release the tentacles of the past, and you come effortlessly into a deep level of the present. The present rather than the past now shapes whom you are and what you choose to experience. In this state, you act intuitively, are motivated by high principles, and operate from an awareness that is independent of self.
So these are the sections that make up The Avatar Course. They are intended to be experiential rather than intellectual.
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The most recent International Avatar Course was held in Orlando, FL and consisted of over 400 students and Masters from more than 40 countries. In a safe, caring and comfortable environment, an International team of licensed Avatar Masters guided the students in an exploration of their consciousness and how life works.
One by one as the “Newest Avatar on Planet Earth” were announced, there was a renewed sense of hope and joy for the awakening of our beautiful planet.
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Altamonte Springs, Florida - August 1, 2008 — While the current economy has brought difficulties to many businesses, Stars Edge continues to experience record-breaking attendance of its personal development Avatar® Course.
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In 1986, a teacher named Harry Palmer created The Avatar® Course. That same year he founded Star’s Edge International®, the seminar management corporation that supervises the delivery of the Avatar Materials. Harry’s writings are a profound contribution to the growing body of knowledge, exercises, and processes directed to self-improvement. Many individuals and companies in the personal-development industry have adopted his ideas.
Harry Palmer dresses simply, lives simply, and remembers to open the door for the ladies. He looks at you steadily when you talk, and you get the feeling that he is interested in what you have to say; he is. In sharp contrast, he is also the CEO of a rapidly growing international corporation and the unexpected inheritor of a prestige that once belonged only to prominent spiritual leaders. This simple man’s writings are creating a movement that is sweeping the planet.
His bestselling book, Living Deliberately (currently available in 20 languages) describes his personal path to enlightenment, and the subsequent insights that were to become the foundation of the three-section, nine-day Avatar Course. (A prominent liberal arts professor described the Avatar Course as: “… an elegant blend of oriental philosophy and western cognitive psychology that provides a fast, experiential route to restoring self-determinism.”)
Harry’s lofty aim is to contribute to the creation of an enlightened planetary civilization®. This goal has been embraced by thousands of Avatar graduates from 71 countries.
In a private interview, Harry Palmer spoke about his strategy for contributing to an enlightened planetary civilization:
Q. The first question is why?
Harry: I’ve worked a lot of jobs in my life, and I’ve been successful at most of them. But the job that really excites me, the one that makes me feel good in my soul, is contributing to the creation of an enlightened planetary civilization. It is a motivation that comes from something deeper and purer than service to self.
Q. How do you describe yourself?
Harry: I wouldn’t…(laughs) Okay, I will. Hardcore visionary! The visionary part is because of my belief in an enlightened planetary civilization. I believe it will happen. The hardcore part is because I am actively committed to it, and I don’t give up on things I believe in.
Q. How do you plan to succeed when others have failed?
Harry: My plan is simple: help the people next to you wake up beyond their Darwinic mind dream. And after they realize who they really are, where they are, and what is happening, show them how to pass the lessons on. Of course, if you want their best, full-time efforts, there are economic and social realities that need to be considered and addressed. People like to help each other, but they also like to live comfortably and feel safe with friends. So the lessons must be valuable enough to the people who receive them that they are happy to pay a fair price.
One of the things that I have learned from life is that service to others, if it is done well and within a viable economic context, is contagious. Help someone; show kindness, and the next thing you know they are figuring out how to pass it on to someone else. That’s my strategy for contributing to an enlightened planetary civilization. I intend to create, within a viable economic context, an epidemic of compassion.
