Clear and Open

There are six things with which humans have profound difficulty and confusion: God, sex, love, money, death, and power. This course is about power.

Lord Acton famously said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We’ve heard this so many times that we tend to believe it without actually thinking it through.

Acton was an English politician and historian, so while opinion is understandable, he was no philosopher. A true critical thinker wouldn’t accept the assertion.

How is it exactly that power corrupts? Is corrupting people its nature, or is it ours? Is it a bit of both? Is there no way to prevent what power does to people? It’s certainly easy to observe that people with power tend to misuse it, but to blame power for this is like blaming the ocean for getting you wet.

“Water wets, and the ocean wets absolutely.”

Sure, if you jump into it! You’re not a victim of water, nor are you a victim of power. You are responsible for how you relate to it.

Lord Acton died in 1902, just as Sigmund Freud pioneered psychology. Freud showed us the human unconscious in ways the world never appreciated, and the evolution of his discipline shows us exactly why power is so confusing for humans in a way that would have embarrassed Acton.

Power reveals corruption that was already there, it doesn’t create it. If you have 100 feet of pipe with a trickle of water running through it, you won’t notice a few small leaks. But if you put 500 liters per hour through it, you certainly will.

That’s how power works. Power puts more energy through your system so that the issues you have become more pronounced. This is not power’s fault, but rather the gift it gives us. It shows us who we are.

Without power as a mirror, many people would go their entire lives without seeing the hidden aspects of their wounded unconscious. Like everything in this world, power wants us to become aware, heal, and be whole.

But if your projections onto power cause you to play victim to it, crave it, fear it, hate it, etc. then you don’t live in Reality to that degree. You don’t actually know what power is. You only know what you made up about it.

This is how most people live their entire lives, inside a virtual reality they create about power (as well as death, love, sex, money, and God). It turns out Life is not okay with your illusions about it, and It seeks to wake you up, via suffering. This is what corruption is: the suffering caused by an unhealthy relationship to power.

The seeking of power leads to its abuses because the quest for power is always proof of its lack. On the other side, when we don’t stand in our power, we attract people who take advantage of us. Most people pendulum back and forth between grabbing at and pushing away power and wonder why they have problems in relationships, management, excellence, leadership, and many other domains.

When the pendulum stops swinging, you find your authentic power. It needs no seeking, creating, gripping, or cultivating. It just is.

How do we get there? How do we relate to power in a way where we wield what is ours, without being corruptible? Where in your life are you shrinking to fit or expanding to dominate in ways that stem from your childhood wounding?

These and many more questions we’ll explore in Claiming Self-Authority: Access to Authentic Power, a psychospiritual, experiential course that invites you into the depths of your unconscious to clean your relationship to power from the inside out.

The live course runs 11 weeks, from January 7, 2021 to March 25. Live class times are 11:15 am PT every Thursday. Session recordings are available within 24 hours.

You can purchase the course alone or become a dojo member and get access to this and all other online courses, as well as two hours/month of office hours to get 1-1 support from Josef.