DigElog U

Understanding The Power of Receptive Choice : Dance With The Elephant

 

Receptive Choice is the second part of Life's Cosmic Equation that empowers you to discover the path in life that matches your creative power.  It frees you from the shackles of family and social norms which allows you to break free into the horizon of your unique and personal destiny in life. 

To apply Receptive Choice into your daily life requires a four step process.  Stop, Look, Choose and Act.  You first have to STOP what you're doing long enough to step back from the patterns of your past.  Take some time to LOOK in the mirror and see yourself for who you truly are at this moment in time.  How does what you see identify, support and further develop your Creative Power in life?  CHOOSE if what you see and where you are is where you want to be in the future.  Finally, ACT upon the choices you make to better match a path that will guide you to life's destiny and your chosen cosmic legacy.

Receptive Choice is really the golden ticket, the precious key, to understanding how to take total control and responsibility of your life. Receptive Choice means you’re going to be open and available to your creative energy. You will consciously work to understand, nurture and develop yourself, so you can maximize your unique journey in the universe. You will learn to accept responsibility for your choices and purpose in life. Receptive Choice is understanding that you control the steering wheel, brakes, and gas pedal of your life.

Since life began as we know it, all living organisms have been a part of the cosmic law of unity. Everything exists in unity with something else. Nothing lives in total isolation or independence. All living things are constantly evolving in a continuous dance with similar species, toward greater complexity and higher forms of interaction. This activity has been studied and documented by the science community that even simple cells have social and cosmic interaction. We know organic living cells, birds, fish, mammals all show signs of interaction, repelling, and attraction. We may not think they are given Receptive Choice, but they fully demonstrate through their capacity of survival, the ability to adapt and evolve through space and time. 

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Donald Calhoun Exclusive Story - The Passing of Brother Bob : Dance With The Elephant

THIS IS AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK, DANCE WITH THE ELEPHANT: LIFE'S COSMIC EQUATION

DON CALHOUN'S WORDS:

It was my first day back to work since my brother Bob had unexpectedly passed away. My primary mentor in life, the man I considered as my second father, the guy I always aspired to be like, was taken away from me in an instant, he just fell down one day in his cabin and died at age 63. For the first time in my life, I, the professional memorial counselor, was faced with the sobering reality my clients bring to me every day, the fact that death and the loss of loved ones suck! The reality was, I was still suffering a bushel basket of grief and my mental state was in no way ready to handle the emotional anguish of another grieving client.

But sometimes miracles happen and the moment you feel like the storms of life are about to drown you in sorrow, someone throws you a life jacket of hope. That morning, a couple walked through the office door who had traveled a hundred miles to see me. I had never met Kris and Rod before but our coming together that day was surely divine providence. The same week my brother had died, they too suffered a startling loss. Their son Miles, a strapping young man on the high school wrestling team, had suddenly collapsed and died during a wrestling match. He had been born with a rare heart defect that remained undetected until that fatal moment on the mat, in front of all of his team mates. The parents, still in shock and consumed by their grief, were looking to find a memorial that would appropriately represent their cherished son.

We were three weeping souls that auspiciously came together that day and poured our buckets of pain and suffering onto the floor of my office. Normally it's my job to ask penetrating emotional questions to help clients dig deeper into the meaningful stories of their loved ones. I instinctively act out of love and care for the grieving family. But today was uniquely different.

Today, I desperately needed love and support for the loss of my brother as much as Kris and Rod looked for comfort with their son. We were mutual guiding spirits that day and established a trusting bond together that would buoy us over the next couple months as the memorial design process for their son's monument evolved. 

It was during our final meeting together that Kris turned to me out in the parking lot and looked directly into my eyes, "Don, thank you for helping me understand and process Miles' death. You, better than anyone inside or outside my family, helped me connect to the loving gift he still is to me." I replied that fortuitously she had done the same and helped me rise from the emotional abyss of my brother's death to understand how his spirit stills lives in me. Together, we remembered the gifts, lessons and stories that both Bob and Miles gave to life. We gave honor and respect to the legacy of their lives and recognized their unending spirit within us.

Death is just a reality of life and it is a gift that helps us anchor understanding, appreciation and the value of living in the moment. For the past 30 years, I have built my career around helping people connect with the stories that represent their loved ones and finding ways to represent those legacy memories on a granite memorial. 

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Who Or What Controls My Life? : Dance With The Elephant

So who or what really controls your life?  If you're true to yourself as it relates to all the controlling influences that surround you, control of your life's direction is a monumental challenge.  If there are any choices in life, they're based on the options provided by societal norms, options that have nothing to do with our creative power and personal destiny. 

 

We're faced with another life paradox.  None of us want to feel that our life is being controlled by anyone or anything based on our God given freedoms, and yet to live in a world based on success and status we have to conform to the values and rules of the given social system.

 

Once again in Dancing With The Elephant, where the elephant represents the society you live in, it is receptive choice that will empower you to choose a direction in life that will enhance your creative power and to have faith that you will reach your cosmic destiny and legacy.  Although the actual world around you will change very little, your perception of it and your relationship to it will match your personal values and meaning.

 

This has been a major research topic for the past century involving famous names like Freud, Rank, Kierkegaard and Ernest Becker.  Men who spent most of their lives trying to explain how it is that most of mankind avoids epidemic levels of psychological neurosis and psychosis.  Day to day life in our world can be a pretty crazy place and its amazing that more of us don't choose the psychotic path.

 

The reality is, in the big picture we have very little control over anything in life, but we do have control how we perceive it and how we react to it.  Life's Cosmic Equation can be a powerful tool to bring greater happiness and fulfillment to your daily life.  Understanding and applying the equation will empower you to see life differently and to make it your life, your destiny and your legacy.

 

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Who is Right - Science or Religion? : Dance With The Elephant

So who is right, science or religion?  The question centers around the third component of Life's Cosmic Equation (CP + RC + F (Faith) * T = CL ), the topic of Faith.  Faith is normally a word associated with religious beliefs.  Most of the time we don't think of faith being a part of the secular scientific approach to solving the mysteries of the universe.  

 

When we Dance With The Elephant, faith is the common link that bridges both communities.  A scientist places belief in a theory or a hypothesis on the basis of limited evidence and as a starting point for further investigation.  It is faith that motivates the cosmologist to venture into the unknown trusting and confident that new discoveries will be made.  That same faith is present in the religious belief system based on spiritual apprehension rather than scientific proof or validation.  God and the doctrines of the specific religion become the unknown requiring the believer to have faith.

 

Both science and religion are witnessing what Ray Kurzweil calls the law of accelerating returns.  We live in a world where the advances made in human-created technology are expanding at an exponential rate.  Not just one plus one, but two times two times two.  Think of walking 30 steps in a linear world and you just walked the distance of each step times 30.  Walk 30 steps in the exponential world and you just covered the distance of a single step times 1 billion.  Science and religion are both facing an immediate future involving exponential rates of change and only through faith will civilization have the capacity to dance with it.

 

In a world of exponential accelerating change, both science and religion are pitted against the same great unknown.  Hopefully, through our common star dust origins, there is a story that can bridge and unite the divide that existed in the past between these two faith based groups.  Each of us must apply the entire Life's Cosmic Equation to our lives and dig deeper into the question of what will bring purpose and meaning to our lives in this new exponential evolving world we're now entering into.

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Why Do We Do The Things That We Do, When We Do It? - A Memorial Day Tribute: Dance With The Elephant

Modern day science approximates that 50% of who you are is based on your genetics.  The DNA passed on to you by your parents and the 400,000 years of human generations before them, make up half of the composition of your personality.  It's what you've got to work with and there's nothing you can do about it. 

 

Now its the other 50% that is a bit more interesting in the fact that it is totally predicated by the environment we grow up in and the choices we personally make within those surroundings.  Since birth most of us have lived with parents, siblings and relatives who had certain traditions, values and norms.  This group of people you live with are located in a geographical location that has a dominant culture, religion and societal framework.  All these pieces of the puzzle play a role in forming your personality, character and temperament.  To exist with in a social system, one must conform to the norms and values of that system.

 

Don grew up in an Irish family where the gift of story telling and the attention it would bring you was a part of daily life.  In his early years of life, he interacted with the world for the sole purpose of receiving approbation and praise in return.  He was always asking himself, "What do people think of me?",  "Do they like me?",  "Do they think I'm funny and a great person to be with?"  This tendency for self-affirming feedback became an addiction for Don and eventually approached neurosis.  Finally, it was when people would give him positive feedback and he didn't believe they were being genuine that Don's sole purpose in life took a deep nose dive.

 

Maturity and true friends helped Don move beyond his personal paradox and to begin approaching life with a new paradigm.  Don realized that his perception of personal worth and value could no longer be measured by the response of the people around him.  He needed to be strong enough, courageous enough and worthy enough to love himself for just being who he is.  He was okay with the fact that someone might not like him and might not enjoy his colorful story telling.

 

Researcher/Author Brene Brown has spent much of her life researching the human dynamics of shame, blame and guilt.  For most of us, these three words can play a big part in our daily lives.  Ironically, all three words require the receiver to agree with the blamer.  In other words, if I am going to feel guilty about something I'm accused of being responsible for, I have to receptively choose to accept the guilt internally.  When you learn to Dance With The Elephant, you can learn to shield yourself from these energy sucking demons and let them bounce off you like ping pong balls.  You have the power of receptive choice to frame and direct your destiny in life.

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UNIVERSAL TRUTHS - A Guide To Your Happiness : Dance With The Elephant

There are universal truths that connect each of us to a past history that goes back not just hundreds, but billions of years.  When you look up into the sky at night, those stars were responsible for creating the fundamental elements that make up all living things.  The majority of the elements found in the periodic table were made from the birth and death of stars.  The universal truth is the fact those elements form the building blocks of life that link us directly to the stars in the sky.  We are and have always been connected to these beginnings.

 

Who we are and what we become in life is based on two primary influences, our biology and our environment.  We have a biological genetic history that was passed down to us from our parents, our grand parents, our great grandparents and so on.  Those genetics were directly responsible for the shape of our nose, the length of our arms and the size of our brain.  Of equal importance is the social environment we grew up in.  What were the values, norms and cultural guidelines of the tribe you grew up in?  In order for you to be accepted in your family, community and world, you had to conform to certain ideas and concepts that formed the way to look and think about life.

 

My Dad always had the saying, "The apple falls only so far from the tree".  He use this phrase when he'd talk about kids in the neighborhood.  This inference was that if you knew the parents and how they acted, you most likely knew how the kids would grow up and what you could expect out of them.  The universal truth here was that only a given amount of change can be expected from one generation to another.

 

These universal truths are all about our ability to identify our "receptive choice" in life.  Although there are certainly limits as to how far one can live outside the norms and values of the society they live in, there is definitely an opportunity to discover your universal creative power and to pursue a life filled with personal passion in pursuit of fulfilling purpose and happiness.

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Having and Finding Faith : Dance With The Elephant

 

 

 

Faith is the third part of Life’s Cosmic Equation. When added to Creative Power and Receptive Choice it makes up what is called the cosmic trinity. The cosmic trinity makes up the unifying creative force that joins together all things in the universe. Faith allows you to cope with the constant unknown part of daily life. No one knows what tomorrow will bring, yet through faith, we can survive and even thrive in the uncertainty. You can be fully connected to your passionate creative purpose and your reason for existing, but it is faith that bridges the who you are today, with the uncertain destiny of what you will become tomorrow. 

 

Your capacity for personal faith (Me) has its origin in both in your genetics and cultural upbringing. Modern day science estimates that 50% of who you are is based on your genetics. The DNA passed on to you by your parents and the 400,000 years of human generations before them, make up half of the composition of your personality. It's what you've got to work with and there's nothing you can do about it.

 

Now it's the other 50% that is a bit more interesting in the fact that it is totally predicated by the environment we grow up in and the choices we personally make within those surroundings. Since birth most of us have lived with parents, siblings and relatives who had certain traditions, values and norms. This group of people you live with are located in a geographical location that has a dominant culture, religion and societal framework. All these pieces of the puzzle play a role in forming your personality, character and temperament. To exist with in a social system, one must conform to the norms and values of that system. The level of faith you have in yourself today was determined by the genetics of your birth and the human interactions that followed ever since. 

 

Faith is a place of mystery, where we nd the courage to believe in what we cannot see and the strength to let go of our fear of uncertainty... Get Deliberate; Get Inspired; Get Going! 

 

 

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What Is The Purpose Of Life? : Dance With The Elephant

We begin with the question, where does one find purpose and passion in life?

 

Certainly each of us have observed people around us that seem to have no sense of purpose or direction in life.  They live in the land of mush where they go through each day being tossed and turned aimlessly by the culture and systems that control their every move. They wander forlornly with glazed eyes and go through the motions of daily life without purpose or meaning.

 

Your sense of purpose relates directly to the first component of Life's Cosmic Equation.  Creative Power or CP is the recipe of life you were destined to cook.  Your job in life is to dream, discover and apply your creative passion in this world to change it in some way.  You will change it as only your unique creative power can.  The universe will be a better place because you dreamed, explored and discovered something very special during your life.

 

And when the cradle of life called death, comes knocking at your door, you'll greet it with that same creative power and passion,  You will ride away on the radiant winds of the universe.  But before you leave you must pass the torch of your legacy over to those who will follow you.  Your light will become their light and your future will become their future.  In this way your cosmic legacy will live on forever.

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The Foundation of Dance With The Elephant

Your Cosmic Legacy, in its simplest form, is your ability to combine your Creative Power, Receptive Choice and Faith together, in the amount of Time you're given in life, to plant your apple seed and see it grow into the tree it was meant to be, and to bear great fruit. But of equal importance, is the fact that in order for your legacy to live on beyond your death, someone else has to carry your story forward. Your Cosmic Legacy is more about the relationships and the people you touched in life, than it is about the accomplishments or achievements you made. It's less about the "me" of life, and more about the "we" of life.

To truly understand Life's Cosmic Equation (WE), we must first revisit the primary equation that precedes it, or Life's Quantum Equation (ME). In the Quantum Equation you add energy, focus and commitment together and then multiply the three by action. The quantum result is equal to your life's destiny. With the Cosmic Equation, we are combining the energy, focus, commitment and action of two or more people into a unified effort that results in a cosmic legacy. We need our connection to others to help us grow, and we grow most through the experience of helping others grow.

The key to fully manifesting the Cosmic Legacy concept of “we”, is to remember that life is not all about you. The greatest impact of your legacy will come from the interactions with the people that you touched and influenced during your life. It does not matter if you are the President of the United States, or a homeless person living under a bridge, the people you touch during your journey in life, your legacy, has equal value and merit. Your story is a part of a constantly evolving story of the universe. In the space time continuum of the universe, there is no such thing as good and bad, virtue and wickedness, right and wrong or purposeful and aimless. The universe has a creative destiny that will include your contribution, regardless of the cosmic legacy you choose to leave behind. Each of us has an apple seed to plant or our Thomas Edison blueprint to fulfill. What will be your light bulb? How will your energy shine? What electric connections will you bring to the world around you? And through the connections you make with people throughout your life, how will your light shine even brighter? And finally, upon your death, will your cosmic legacy give rise to even greater connections and energy, leaving a brighter future for the universe?

You and everyone else in this world exists in unity with someone else. There is a connection of energy between all things that is a reality, a constant, an omnipresent link between past, present and future. We are all connected, not just as fellow human beings, but to the 13.7 billion years of cosmic interaction. Since the beginning of time, what has been created is an infinite, boundless web of connections that tie all things in the universe together. We cannot escape the fact that we are all connected in a cosmic and heavenly way. The question here is not one of creation but one of identication. No one has to create connections to one another, all you have to do is identify the reality that the connections already exist. Together this energy fuses into creative power that inspires new discoveries and gives meaning to life.

We're dancing with another life paradox here in the fact that you, as an individual, can successfully apply your energy, focus, commitment and actions to achieve your every destiny in life; but in the end, following your death, your cosmic legacy will be determined by everyone but you. Your legacy story will be created by the people who knew you and connected with your destiny. The legacy that you leave behind will represent the choices, actions and relationships you cultivated along the journey of life. 

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Sharing Inspiring Words

 

"...I walked out onto a dock in the Gulf of Mexico.  I ceased to exist.  I experienced being a part of the sea breeze, the movement of the water and the fish, the light rays cast by the sun, the colors of the palms and tropical flowers.  I had no sense of past or future.  It was not a particularly blissful experience: it was terrifying.  It was the kind of ecstatic experience I'd invested a lot of energy in avoiding.

I did not experience myself as the same as the water, the wind, and the light, but as participating with them in the same system of movement.  We were all dancing together..."

-Don Johnson

Just as Don has elegantly stated, WE are all connected to the great wonders of the world.  To the earth, to the cosmos, to people, to everything.  Dance With the Elephant looks to give an outlook into how you, as an individual, have the ability to take your creative self through it's destined journey.  We found this quote to be inspiriational and devotely a part of what "dancing" with the elephant is all about.  Connections with the world and its people is a magical happening.  We hope you enjoyed this quote as much as we have.

 

 

To discover the book that we found this quote from, Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer - An Approach to Life in Fullness check it out at Amazon!

 

 

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