Entrapment

Copyright © 2014 by Roman Harambura and Ilona Schultz.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2014937434

ISBN:      Hardcover             978-1-4828-9570-4

               Softcover               978-1-4828-9572-8

               eBook                    978-1-4828-9573-5

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Ilona Schultz - Co Author

With my deepest gratitude to Ilona Schultz co Author to this book Entrapment. Who I have known for 23 years, without her hard work this book would have not been possible, I personally thank her from the deepest essence of my heart. Ilona has shared her knowledge, her love, her wisdom and most of all her understanding that this book Entrapment must be shared with the masses.

Sydney Felicio – Publishing Services Associate

I would also like to acknowledge and express my gratitude to Sydney Felicio from Partridge Publishing Singapore, who has been my Publishing Service Associate over the last eight months, Sydney has supported me every step of the way, I am deeply grateful.

Bon Carlo – Marketing Consultant

I would also like to acknowledge and express my gratitude to my friend Bon Carlo also from Partridge Publishing, who is my Marketing Consultant, who has been there every step of the way, he has guided me in the best way to promote Entrapment, and he is a man with many talents.

Michelle Spear

I also wish to thank my precious friend, Michelle Spear for her love and support, who was of great help to me in many areas, when I found it difficult to coupe, she was there to give a helping hand, Michelle is a beautiful person in so many ways, a brilliant Face & Body Painting Artist. I urge you to look her up on her website: www.meisha.com.au

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

EGO

Ego the creator

The many faces of ego

•   Competition

•   Vanity

•   Guilt & blame

•   Martyrs

•   Domination

•   Excuses

•   Opinions

FEAR

Where fear comes from

Fear—the genetic link

The past—its effects on our present and future

Emotions vs feelings

Emotions—the great manipulators

Belief systems and conditioning

Fear creates our present and future

REVELATION

RESPONSIBILITY

Why we give personal responsibility away

How we give personal responsibility away

Being 100% personally responsible

The greater picture

LOVE

Conditional love—ego’s idea of love

Unconditional love—a state of being

The hurt child within

Forgiveness—healing the hurt child within

Creative visualisation

Unconditional love—a way of life

TRUTH

Ego’s idea of truth

Finding truth

Living your truth

Living your truth—putting it into practice

CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

Over several years Roman and I have presented many courses, lectures, workshops and seminars on quite a number of self help and metaphysical subjects. Our observations of the people who attended, along with observations of ourselves and of people we met daily, led us to realise there was a need for a book and perhaps even a seminar which could help people find simplicity in their life by gaining a deeper understanding of themselves. We would all agree that life is becoming increasingly more complicated as well as speeding up to the point where we simply don’t have enough time in any given day to achieve everything we would like to achieve. We don’t seem to be able to catch our breath long enough before rushing off to take care of yet another responsibility or demand, leaving precious little time to ourselves. To compensate, we seek fulfilment and enrichment outside of ourselves by taking up hobbies or sport, or through reading books or attending courses for personal growth and spiritual enlightenment in an attempt to bring clarity and happiness into our lives, and to find some meaning and purpose to our lives one way or another. Yet we rarely seem to question why we feel the way we do or how we ended up in the situation we find ourselves today. These are very important questions, for in our individual responses lie the answers to why we feel unfulfilled and why we lack enthusiasm or direction in our lives. All we know is that we aren’t completely satisfied with our lot and wish our life could be simpler or easier.

Most people believe more money will solve all our problems. True, money is a great help in a world obsessed with material possessions, but money isn’t the real answer to the nagging discontent that surfaces on a regular basis. We can find temporary happiness or life purpose through any number of distractions, but eventually boredom and monotony sets in, and before too long we find we’re looking once more for something else to excite or distract us to fill the emptiness that has resurfaced. Most people seek understanding, an identity or life purpose through the world outside of themselves, such as through a career, personal interests or religious/spiritual study. Roman and I have discovered that everything outside of our being is meaningless if we are not in touch with our selves. That is, the simple life we crave eludes us when we allow the distractions of the world outside of us to become more important than the world that exists within us. Most people don’t know what they want out of life because while they know what will make them happy for a while, they really don’t know what will make them happy for the rest of their lives.

This book will not give you ten steps to personal happiness. Nor will it show you clever little diagrams to rationalise the discontent you may be feeling, or inundate you with trendy psychobabble to explain away every possible emotional ailment you may be experiencing. It is a simple book written in simple language so that anyone can pick it up, read it and understand what is being expressed. The purpose of this book is to help people understand themselves and how they are responsible 100 % for what they experience and how they process and comprehend those experiences—that is, to understand how they have become the person they are today what has shaped their understanding, their beliefs, and their fears and how their understanding, beliefs, and fears impact on their lives on a daily basis and their life overall. In other words, how the effects of what we think, believe, say and do create the outcomes we experience that become our daily lives and the rest of our life. Life has become increasingly complicated and stressful, and only we, the individual, can bring simplicity back into our lives to redress the balance and restore some of that lost clarity and focus. Quite simply, this book is a tool to help you carry out the necessary self examination through which you can achieve personal happiness. How much and how far you push yourself is entirely up to you. The miracle of personal growth is not so much the instruments you use, such as this book, but the resolve and tenacity of your true self to get yourself out of the rut you may find yourself in at this point in your life. This book will help you understand what holds you back from finding and maintaining personal happiness and fulfilment throughout your life, and it will help you to realise that we’re all in the same boat; we are all looking for happiness, contentment and love.

We do not claim this book to be a work of social or scientific research. As the writers, it is the result of both internal research and external observation of the world around us, which is what writers essentially do when they practice and hone their craft. It has been an enormous personal challenge and an incredible learning curve. The process has been both frustrating and exhilarating, but the end result has been an incredibly rapid expansion of consciousness and personal growth, giving us a greater sense of confidence and personal control within our life. The name we have given to the process which you will experience when you work through this book is self realisation, meaning realisation of the self. Whilst self realisation is not a subject specifically dealt with to any large extent, it is the end result of working through this book from beginning to end, happening automatically by simply thinking about what is being discussed. Therefore, provided your intentions are sincere and you work through this book actively contemplating what you are reading, you will achieve self realisation by the time you reach the end of it, without having to worry about how to make it happen or whether or not it is happening at all.

We are not asking that the reader adopts the knowledge in this book as their truth or to make it their belief. That is not its purpose. This book is simply an instrument to be used as a starting point to help people examine their lives in order to gain a deeper understanding of their existence and how they create the experiences and perceptions they have of those experiences every day of their lives. It can be said in all honesty that this book is not the result of anyone else’s work, beliefs or philosophy—it is our truth, Roman’s and mine. We acknowledge that very few ideas in this world are completely new, and we also acknowledge that other writers have written similar material to ours. However, this book is the culmination of Roman’s and my work together, which is why we can say this book is our truth. We trust this book will help everyone who reads it to experience, as we had, the elation and conscious awakening that self realisation brings. The beauty about this book is that you can read it and reread it, and find it will continue to trigger new realisations and insights within you every time you do. We can say this with confidence because it still does for us, and we wrote it!

It is important to read this book from beginning to end so that you fully comprehend the context in which statements are made. We all have a habit of browsing and reading certain passages that grab our attention or interest, but to gain a full appreciation and understanding of what is being expressed it is very important that this book is read thoroughly and in sequence. Please do not skip any chapters or read it out of sequence, otherwise you may find yourself confused at times by what is being expressed, or worse, you may jump to incorrect conclusions and misunderstand what is being explained altogether. But the most important thing you can do for yourself before even attempting to work through this book is to make sure you approach it with an open mind and an open heart. If you allow your ego to judge and criticise it without giving it a fair go, then you may as well put it away until you are ready to put your ego aside, or failing that, give it away to someone who wants to grow and learn. As with anything new or different, unless you keep an open mind, you will gain very little from the exercise. Thus, before you even begin, a sincere desire to learn will take you half way towards self realisation.

Here is an opportunity to learn to recognise and understand that the power to profoundly and permanently change your life is not only within your reach but is also attainable. Take up the challenge to set yourself free from your entrapment and get your life together, because you deserve to be happy. We know you can do it!

EGO

Hello . . . is there anybody home? Well, is there anybody home? Sometimes that’s the feeling I get when people don’t really listen to what’s being said, or aren’t completely aware of what is going on around them as they go about their daily lives. There is nothing more frustrating than dealing with people who are not completely conscious, and yet so many people live their lives from day to day on auto-pilot. You will never truly appreciate what is around you, or fully understand the complexities of your own existence, until you become a 100% conscious individual who is 100% aware of yourself and everything around you.

Take driving a car for example. Most people drive on auto pilot, not fully aware of where they are or what they’re doing because they’ve driven that route so many times before. They just do it automatically. Yet if you asked them to name three things that they saw while driving which are not normally there, they would be unable to give an answer. And what about that infuriating driver who is busy doing so many other things whilst driving their car that they are not looking where they’re going. For example, talking on their mobile phone whilst looking for the right street to turn into and trying to keep an eye on their dog in the back seat who’s managed to get out of it’s restraint, and all the while tail-gating the car in front because they’re in a hurry to get to their destination. Hence the point, there is nobody home because they are not completely aware of everything they’re doing. Their attention has been distracted by the number of diversions around them in their car which means they are not 100% aware of any or all of their actions and thoughts at that moment. That human body may be driving a vehicle, but what’s driving them?

When you consider this, you begin to understand why there are so many collisions on the road. A collision can’t be justified by simply calling it an accident. Nothing is an accident, it’s just that we haven’t been completely conscious at the time it happened. We were not fully aware of our actions to see how we have made that event occur. We make collisions occur because we are not 100% conscious of our thoughts or actions.

What is driving us if we are unaware of the little things that go on around us on a daily basis? As an introduction to this chapter I would like to draw a distinction between the two levels of thinking people operate on. The first will be referred to as consciousness and the second as ego. Consciousness is our spark of life. It is the energy that is the presence or life force which exists in all forms of life, and would best be described as a state of being. But don’t be mistaken into thinking that consciousness is simply about having a heartbeat, or breathing and pumping blood around a body. Consciousness is the complete awareness of everything and everyone that you come into contact with—it does not make value judgements, but it is totally aware of everything on multiple levels.

Ego is quite different. It is our survival instinct and provides the drive and ambition required to evolve, grow and develop. Physical forms of life need a survival instinct of some sort in order to overcome physical challenges and obstacles. Without this instinct, consciousness in its pure state would not change in any specific way. It would simply be—the same at this point in time as it would have been one hundred million years ago, and would still be one hundred million years from now. It would remain ageless and timeless. Ego, on the other hand, very definitely makes value judgements; that is its purpose. It forms opinions based on the information consciousness has gathered, and from those opinions it makes decisions. That is the nature of survival.

Everything has some kind of ego within it, be it plants that conquer, dominate and destroy other plants, or creatures competing for mates, but we don’t call that ego, we call it nature or refer to it as survival of the fittest. Human ego has evolved to such a degree that it is no longer simply an instinct. It has become a fully blown form of consciousness in its own right. The drive and ambition of ego has helped it to develop and grow into a powerful and overwhelming force which now drives our lives. And so, back to our original question—if we operate on auto-pilot, what then is driving us? The answer, of course, is ego.

Ego, the survival instinct, was once a tool used by our consciousness to protect and help the human animal survive and exist in its environment. But over great expanses of time, ego evolved alongside of consciousness and took over as the primary decision maker. As extraordinary as it may sound, ego has taken over the course of human evolution and directs the course of human life. It strives to increase its dominance, and relentlessly looks for ways in which to exert its power. Hardly surprising since its prime objective has always been to be in complete control of its existence.

An endless battle has evolved between ego and consciousness. Armchair psychologists refer to it as the dark and light side of the human psyche, and it has been believed for an excruciatingly long time that both the good and bad elements inherent in a human being are necessary for maintaining mental balance. Interestingly also, religion has fostered the myth that good and evil within people is either the presence of god or the devil. I beg to differ with this much exploited and romanticised notion. Good and evil is the conflict between our consciousness and ego. We are all capable of good and evil thoughts, words and deeds. Consciousness is our good side—it will happily exist without conflict, not wanting or needing to cause trauma to another form of life. But ego is our bad or evil side—it thrives on conflict, rarely thinking of the destruction or chaos that will follow.

Ego’s ultimate goal is to have complete power over its own existence and destiny.