The whole hollow edifice of the ego-complex is itself a pattern. We behave within these patterns and perceive within them. Our beliefs and our world-view are bounded by them. The ego must impose its pattern on everything compulsively and this is what you are doing. You impose the ego-limitations, ego-contraction, and ultimately ego-patterns on all and everything. You can see it far easier in another. Notice how family, creativity, spirituality -- everything participates in the same essential set of beliefs, assumptions, expectations, and contraction. The outer and the inner worlds are similarly imposed on, so that it seems the survival of your ego depends on a kind of fascistic dominance. Everything conforms to my pattern and I will impose it onto everything.

Now our emotional-behavioral patterns -- perhaps more than any other of the core elements of Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) -- provide us with the opportunity to contemplate the nature of the totality. When and only when we are beyond fashioning and imposing pattern are we spiritually surrendered. For this pattern is the outcome of identification, separation, and division – the very essence of the ego-processes.

This is hardly surprising. Each of the core elements of SAT is an attempt to survive, to exist, to endure the challenges of life and keep our essence intact. The seven core elements of SAT are a detailed description of the prison of egoic contraction. They keep us locked in and ostensibly protected. They were our protective angels, now they are our inner demons working to frustrate us and limit us, to enslave us to an imaginary past. We shall look at how emotional-behavioral patterns do this.

But first: what are emotional-behavioral patterns?

Emotional-behavioral patterns are habitual and defensive reactions to past events that are projected in the field of present time, so that all that is happening is effectively repetitive, limiting, and ultimately affirming the ego-processes and which comprise a unique and individual pattern of manipulation and unconscious beliefs.

So, they reveal the mechanical nature of  how the human being thinks, behaves and "feels" its way through life . How we conform to a set sequence of actions and forfeit our spontaneity, unpredictability, and responsiveness.

We discover our mechanical nature through inner work. Our mechanical behavior is based on the relationship of action to reaction. It is the opposite of response. Our reactions depend on an action that is done to us. Someone else has the power. It is born of the victim mentality. Working and functioning like a machine, we can never be free, only enslaved to a programming that is rooted in the past, an automaton doomed to robotic repetition.

Emotional-behavioral patterns remind us of our mechanical nature. They resemble mechanisms or even puppetry. Because when you start a pattern there is an irresistible compulsion to see it through. It is impossible not to! Like riding a train you buy your ticket and the moment the train leaves the station, the outcome is assured. You enter the initiatory event of an emotional-behavioral pattern and the rest inevitably follows. You seem to be completely helpless.

The way we work with this in therapy is through awareness. By becoming aware of how you react, from the very first interaction to the last, you become aware of the protective predictability of your unconscious patterning.

Richard Harvey is a psycho-spiritual psychotherapist, spiritual teacher, and author. He is the founder of The Center for Human Awakening and has developed a form of depth-psychotherapy called Sacred Attention Therapy (SAT) that proposes a 3-stage model of human awakening. Richard can be reached at info@centerforhumanawakening.com .