Facing Your Goliath on the Battlefield

"...for the battle is the Lord's, and he will give you into our hands."

(See, 1 Samuel 17:45-47 in context).

NOTE TO READERS: This article is an adaptation from a previous article I had published at another blog, and a teaching given by Mormon President Thomas S. Monson. The relevance shares insights in furthering our understanding in facing the challenges in life. Whether one wants to admit it: life is a battle we are engaging in. We either let it defeat us, or we rise and continually prove to be the victors in managing and directing our own life.

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"I... like to think of David as the righteous lad who had the courage and the faith to face insurmountable odds when all other's hesitated, and to redeem the name of Israel by facing that giant in his life - Goliath of Gath." President, Thomas S. Monson.

 

What Goliath stands between us and our happiness? 

The story of David and Goliath is a very profound story of facing one's greatest enemy. The courage to stand alone with only a simple weapon at hand. With faith in Israel's God, David stood face to face with the giant warrior of the Philistines. A shepherd with only five stones and a sling against a Giant clads in battle armor and brandishing weapons of war. To the onlooker, David appeared foolish. Appeared to be on a suicide mission. Yet, there he stood, a young boy facing the greatest enemy of his people. As the account goes, David not only slays Goliath, but he also decapitates the giant's head.

Many people, today, face their Goliath. Whether it is substance use, abuse, traumatic experiences from childhood, rejection, broken-heart, death, or any other significant loss. Armed with only simple means of defending oneself proves to be vital in our fight to continue to endure and overcome our own obstacles in life.

Facing a well-protected giant

Goliath appears to be more powerful when we appear to be suffering. For the individual - it is the courage and faith to stand alone to battle and overcome. Meaning, it is not merely enough to slay - it is to overpower and subdue one's fear. To decapitate it. How is this accomplished?

Just like in the story of David and Goliath, David recognized that the enemy he faced was not merely going to be slain by his own hand. David recognized that it took a greater power than himself to stand there and face the giant of the Philistines. "I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty God" is what David declared.

Higher power and divine inspiration

Recognizing the need of a higher power is not so much about having a sense of religious conviction or experience. The need for a higher power is the recognition that it is going to take something greater than ourselves and greater than the power of our adversity over our lives. We may be armed with simple tools, yet when placed in the hands of one who seeks to rely on their higher power, those simple weapons turn into the greater blessings of defense against the constant slandering of our Goliath. What are these simple tools? The Shepard boy went to the stream and carefully selected five specific smooth stones.

 

Selecting our smooth stones from the stream of life

Stone of Courage

There are two courses in life we may take up our journey. The first is an easy road, well-traveled, conforming to social standards, and easily paved by other individuals who made the journey. It is not our chosen path. The second path we may take up is a journey where we are required to forge our own path. It appears to be impossible, impenetrable, and raises a sense of hopeless. We either surmise it is difficult and opt for the easy, well-traveled path, or become courageous to forge our own path.

The stone of courage gives us the strength to face and overcome our fear and sense of helplessness in life. It provides the means in which, despite our fears, we move forward toward our own sense of purpose and meaning.

Stone of Effort

This stone is two-fold. It is our mental effort and our physical effort. Mental effort in that it takes energy to silence the critical voice in our heads. The voice of judgment, ridicule, criticism. The effort here is capturing our thoughts and challenging them. Physical effort reflects our ability to physically push through to continue toward the realization of our goal. Working to save money, climbing out of our own sense of suffering, endure hardship.

Stone of Humility

This particular stone recognizes our limitations, our weaknesses, and shows our sense of gratitude toward something that is more powerful than our own volition and ability to overcome. It is our ability to recognize the need to surrender and give our own will over to something that provides personal revelation and guidance in our own lives. For the Christian, this is God. For others, a higher sense of consciousness.

Stone of Prayer and meditation

Through our sense of humility, we come to recognize the need to consistently meditate and enter into prayer. It helps keeps us humble, ground us, and connect us to a higher sense of purpose and revelation.

Stone of Duty

The final stone we select is duty. Engaging in facing and overcoming our own adversity and obstacles that bar us from achieving a life of meaning and purpose requires a sense of duty. We continue to follow through with our commitment, whether we may like the presenting circumstances or not.

The Sling of Faith and staff of virtue

These five stones are not enough. We need to have the power the sling of faith offers. Couple this with the staff of virtue, we are steady and ready to face whatever obstacle we may face.

So, how do these stones help bring down the Goliaths in our path?

• Stone of courage destroys our fears
• Stone of effort destroys indecision and procrastination
• Stone of humility will destroy pride/ego and envy
• Stone of prayer and meditation will destroy obstinate
• Stone of duty collides with and destroys anything that threatens our self-respect

Decisions are to be made purposefully

It is when we face adversity in our lives that decisions to go one way or another make a difference. We face battles daily. Our victory does not happen by default. When we move toward a more conscious understanding of living life, we understand that we are to anticipate any challenges and decisions needing to be made.

Do we hide, tremble in fear, or take up the staff of virtue, the sling of faith, and carefully select our stones that will help us defeat whatever Goliath stands in our way?

Premise Two | Emotional intelligence and our Human Experience

 Human experience and conscious living develop through our awareness and need for authenticity. As we continue to explore this concept for a more intentional way of living, the truth behind authenticity segues into our need for emotional intelligence. As we evolved from our primitive roots, our survival depended upon one fundamental truth: society. We are innate social beings. Not only are we social beings, but we are also emotional beings. This is the second fundamental truth. Since our human experience is comprised of the need for social interaction, our interaction within social contexts is based on our emotionally construct.

Through understanding emotional intelligence, and how it relates to conscious living as part of our human experience, we develop a heightened sense of happiness, peace of mind, and our approach in treatment towards others. It is our own personal journey getting to the core essence of self, as well as recognizing the core essence of others.

The essential truth of emotional intelligence is one's ability to balance feelings and reason. It is the heart of empathy and compassion through the recognition of our own emotions as well as the emotions of others. This is two-fold:

1. Recognize and understand our own emotions
2. Recognize, understand, and influence the emotions of others

There are five categories' researchers have identified:

Self-Awareness

Becoming aware of our own emotions in the present moment requires one to "tune into" our true feelings. Recognize the impact and effect they have on us and on others around us. We evaluate our emotions through the lenses of self-worth and confidence as it relates to our own capabilities.

Self-Regulation

In a conversation that is recorded in the beginning pages of the Bible, a profound statement is made. The Lord notices the affect Cain exhibits. In the dialogue, we read that God recognized the anger within Cain. This anger is attached to the sacrifices Abel, and he presented. Abel's was acceptable and pleasing to the Lord, while Cain's was rejected. At this point, Cain has a choice, learn to manage his presenting emotional state and learn to "rule over it" or allow his present emotional state to rule over him and cause him to sin: "and sin is crouching at the door" (Genesis 4:5-7, ESV). 

Since emotions are part of our human experience, we have limited control over how, and when, we may experience our emotions. What we have the capacity to do is manage our emotions:

• Limit impulsive/compulsive decision making
• Maintain healthy standards of honesty and integrity
• Taking responsibility
• Being adaptable and flexible
• Being innovative and receptive

This is important to understand when we experience emotions that are labeled negative (e.g., Anger).

Motivation and empowerment

Emotional intelligence is a drive for our need to progress, evolve, and move forward with innovative ideas.  This requires motivation to achieve specific goals and having the appropriate attitude toward realizing those goals.

• We become driven to strive for excellence and improvement to our quality of life by meeting particular standards
• Our commitment to align with the particular goals of others (work, school, community, society)
• Taking initiative to act on any available opportunities
• Optimism in pushing past any barriers, obstacles, and overcoming setbacks

Setting and achieving goals, whether personal or communal, empowers and motivates us to strive toward becoming more and more enriched with our own defining of authenticity and intentional living consciously.

Empathy

The ability to discern how others are feeling appears to be another integral component to our human experience and conscious living. It goes beyond merely attempting to understand how a person feels. It is developing a sense of understanding their presenting emotions, how it influences your own emotions, and the ability to respond in healthy ways. This appears to look like:

• One's ability to anticipate another individual need and be of service in meeting those needs
• Developing and influencing others by seeing their need to progress
• Leveraging and networking through diverse people to cultivate opportunities to collaborate
• Ability to read another individual/group emotional currents
• Having an understanding of other people through discernment of their feelings behind needs and wants

This is where conscious living is anchored.

Social Skills

This feeds back into the fundamental truth that part of our human experience centers around social interaction. We develop interpersonal skills - or, how we relate to others and how they relate to us in defined relationships. What this looks like is:

• Influence - essential the fine art of persuasion
• Ability to communicate clear messages
• Guiding and inspiring other individuals
• Initiating change, or, providing a catalyst for change to take place within others
• Ability to engage in conflict management and resolution
• Nurturing and cultivating genuine relationships with others
• Working with others in a collaborative environment to achieve common goals
• Creation of synergy within a collective consciousness to meet collective goals

Without healthy relationships that are consciously cultivated, we falter in developing the ability to empathize, understand, and negotiate.  (Adapted from What is Emotional Intelligence (EQ)). 

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Daniel Goleman's is a recommended book to further explore the idea of Emotional Intelligence. It is groundbreaking in presenting an understanding of how our rational and emotional components of perception and success in our personal lives. It delves into how we relate to others based on the idea of Emotional literacy. 

By purchasing this book through the link above, you are supporting continued publication of relevant, thought provoking, and inspiring articles and essays on presenting political, social, and religious issues facing us today.

Premise One | Authenticity is Essential to the Human Experience

 To begin understanding how authenticity is essential to the human experience, we first may want to establish an understanding of what the human experience is all about. Many people offer different ideas as to what the human experience is all about.

In the introduction to his article, The Human Experience, Robert Firestone, Ph.D. writes:

Human beings, unlike other species, are cursed with a conscious awareness of their own mortality. I believe that the tragedy of the human condition is that people's awareness and true self consciousness concerning this existential issue contributes to an ultimate irony: Human beings are both brilliant and aberrant, sensitive and savage, exquisitely caring and painfully indifferent, remarkably creative and incredibly destructive to self and others. The capacity to imagine and conceptualize has negative as well as positive consequences because they predispose anxiety states that culminate in a defensive form of denial.

Michael Neill surmises three universal principles related to the human experience. He observes that these universal principles have been observed in science, philosophy, and religion. He provides a brief description:

The Principle of Mind:
There is an energy and intelligence behind life. This is ever present but is not ‘in control’ – it has no inherent morality or apparent point of view. It simply ensures that but for the interference of external circumstance, acorns become oak trees, cuts heal, and life begets life.

The Principle of Consciousness:
The capacity to be aware and experience life is innate in human beings. It is a universal phenomenon. Our level of awareness in any given moment determines the quality of our experience.

The Principle of Thought:
We create our individual experience of reality via the vehicle of thought. Thought is the missing link between the formless world of pure potentiality and the created world of form.

From a more practical, and appropriate spiritual viewpoint, the existential question of the Human Experience becomes even more precarious in teaching and discussion. This is because various religious philosophies attempt to prescribe a "right way of thinking" in regards to the nature of the Human experience.

Spiritual Authenticity and our human experience

There is a vast difference between religious belief and spirituality. Religion, and religious belief, is based on specific dogma's, rituals, requirements of membership into the specific community of believers, and acceptance to particular doctrines that are deemed acceptable. Religion basis the belief, doctrines, and teachings on particular sacred texts. Spirituality, on the other hand, focuses more on the practical aspects of living out specific values and beliefs. Within a religious context, it is the person living out the values and beliefs espoused by the community of faith one belongs.

Spiritual authenticity is the ideology of an individual living out what they have come to identify as core values and beliefs. It moves beyond mere membership within a faith based community. It transcends religious rituals and rites of passages. In some ways, spirituality is the self-actualization and transcendence of an individual.

It is noted that humanity has always had an innate desire for the spiritual. Meaning, part of our human experience in this life is to have some form of belief where we seek guidance, sustenance, develop faith in, and a hope for something far better than what we may experience in the present moment.

In his article, published at Psychology Today, April 2013, Dr. John Chirpian, Ph.D, Th.D. provides 12 characteristics of inauthentic religiosity. He then prescribes 12 characteristics of authentic religiosity that may shape our own human experience. His recommendation, review the two list and see where one may reside in relationship to inauthenticity or authentic spiritual awareness and spiritual authenticity.

So, how does spiritual authenticity help shape our own human experience? And, what does it have to do with living consciously?

Authentic and conscious living is courageous living

Through spiritual authenticity, we no longer live in a spirit of fear. We also, no longer live in a spirit of control. These two great illusions prevent us from fulfilling our own sense of happiness and well-being. What this means is: when we live in fear, we are living a life we do not believe we are capable of overcoming. When we live in the illusion of having control, we may become rigid, unable to be flexible, and experience greater and greater disappointment, as well as suffering.

Giving up our illusion of control. By facing our fears, we are capable of empowering ourselves to live close to our key values and beliefs. We move from faith to faith, hope to hope, and we experience all that life has to offer. We have the empowerment to accept life on it's own terms, find the value in our own adversity, and develop resilience to press forward.

Success only happens when we come to realize who we truly are, understand our own purpose and meaning, and utilize our experience and knowledge in order to serve other people. Success is tied to self-actualization and transcendence. It is not about what rights we have, or seeking justice for harm or injustice done. It is living by what we believe to be important to ourselves, to others, and the rewards of service.

We live by the truth of our values. This appears to create transparency within our lives. What we believe internally, as we live out those spiritual truths, become manifested externally.

In the Christian faith and scriptures, Christ teaches that it is by the fruit of man that we shall know him (See, Matthew 7:16-20). The goodness of our heart is cultivated. It is carefully nurtured. In it's season, fruit is produced. Likewise, as we strive to cultivate a sense of authenticity, and living consciously, in its due season, people around us will see our values and beliefs.

It takes courage to face our fears. It takes courage to identify, live by and up to our core values and beliefs. It is not easy because we have to forge our own path, take up our own journey. No one is capable of living out our lives. We are responsible for living.

Therefore, living a conscious and authentic life is the journey to discovery and self-actualization of our own human experience.

Human Authenticity and Conscious Living

 

How does one create a life full of passion, full of meaning, and full of purpose? Pick up any book on the subject matter. Preform a google search on the subject matter. Pilfer through the pages of books, articles, research and studies: And yet, one still comes away with an unsatisfactory answer. How is it possible that so much has been written and taught over the centuries continues to escape the grasp of many people today? Compound this with competing religious ideology as to "which church is right and true?" People are hungering for true authentic human experience yet seem incapable of finding genuine happiness in their lives. We tend to further complicate the issue with political viewpoints. Supporting the right politician, for example, tends to create derision and contention. As a society in America today, we are ever grasping, yet never achieving a sense of authenticity. We have essentially lost sight of true human authenticity and conscious living.

In the introduction of his book, 365 Daily Inspirations for creating a life of passion and purpose (available for purchase at Amazon by clicking the link). author Gay Hendricks provides ten provocative premises for living a conscious life. He calls these "...foundation ideas on which anyone's journey of conscious living is based..." They are as follows:

Guided Premise One: Authenticity is essential. A truthful life is both the outcome of the journey and the means of getting there. A successful life is an authentic life. Happiness and creativity rest on a foundation of transparency to yourself and others. Knowing your own heart and speaking clearly to others keep you on the path.

Guided Premise Two: Things that [may] be felt and seen - peace of mind, happiness, and the humane treatment of others - are higher-priority goals than religious concepts such as original sin or beliefs about life after death. The journey of conscious living is based on getting to a deeper level in yourself than beliefs and opinions, in order to experience the essence of what unifies people, not divides them.

Guiding Premise Three: Conscious living depends on finding out what goals are important to you and moving toward those goals at a pace that allows you to feel vibrant.

Guiding Premise Four: The journey of conscious living begins when you take full responsibility for your life, and slams to halt when you avoid responsibility for anything

Guiding Premise Five: Happiness, success, and sound relationships depend on letting go of controlling things that are beyond your control. Examples of things you cannot control are the feelings of others, the future, the past, and whether or not other people like you.

Guiding Premise Six: Spiritual growth comes through a deep embrace of reality; not through flights of arguable fancy: Transcendence is best accomplished by thoroughly acknowledging - rather than ignoring or denying - such human realities as emotions, sexuality, and conflict.

Guiding Premise Seven: It is possible to make rapid shifts in consciousness - from scarcity to abundance, from defensiveness to openness, from fear to love - and these shifts in consciousness will change the outer circumstances of your life.

Guiding Premise Eight: Peace of mind comes ultimately from making your deepest creative contribution to the community around you. When you make your full contribution, you feel happy; fulfilled, and at ease. When you don't, you don't.

Guiding Premise Nine: Commitment to certain key values - honesty, responsibility, gratitude - not only gives you an inner flow of harmony but also rewards you with an authentic form of power that can be recognized by others. Authentic power comes from authenticity; false power comes from control and ego-aggrandizement.

Guiding Premise Ten: You [may] choose to become the source of attitudes such as gratitude and responsibility (rather than waiting for the events of life to inspire you to adopt them). If you wait for events to trigger those attitudes, you remain locked in a consumer rather than a producer mode and keep yourself trapped in scarcity.

These may serve individuals well in a secular and social context. However, there is greater concern on the more spiritual level of human existence. This greater concern rests on the reality of something far greater than we when it comes to human authenticity and conscious living. The departure from Hendricks is more focused on the power of the spiritual sense of authenticity as it relates to how we interact with others, base our key values and beliefs on, and engage in the social climate of today.

Therefore, we will examine each premise in a more sacred and spiritual application to further anchor the foundation as to what human authenticity and conscious living looks like. The attempt here is to restore and revive the heart and message of spiritual revival and awakening in the heart of humanity, and hopefully, in order to move toward a more sacred sense of transcendence.

Each premise will be given attention in their own essay as to the spiritual and sacred connotations, applications, and development for a more "enlightened" sense of reality. This also requires individuals to take an honest examination of themselves by answering three fundamental questions:

1. Who am I?
2. What is my purpose?
3. How may I be of service toward others?

These are three definitive questions we want to wrestle with. In answering these three questions, we are able to lay the foundation for our own sense of authenticity and conscious living. Upon reading, meditating, and honest search of the heart, may reveal how a true and authentic Christian life is based on these ten pillars of truth.