No stranger to controversy, controversial points of view, or the completely counter-intuitive, Gary Douglas leveled another cannon blast at the walls of the castle of this reality during the recent Australian Access Consciousness® Facilitators’ training. His target this time: Pride.

“Having pride opens the door to all possibilities,” say Douglas. “Everything you’ve been taught in life is that it’s bad to be proud. But if you can’t have pride, you can’t have you.”

“If you can’t be proud, if you can’t have pride, then you can’t do happiness, you can’t do joy, you can’t have possibility, and you can’t have choice,” he continues.

“But wait,” you may be saying. “Isn’t that one of the 7 deadly sins?” Indeed! But have you noticed that the things that are frowned upon by this reality are actually potencies that are available to humanoids if they’re willing to be controversial enough to have them?

“Pride goeth before a fall,” is a platitude. “Every platitude is designed to eliminate gratitude. If you buy that point of view, you will never be grateful for you. If you cannot be grateful for you, you cannot have pride in what you do, you can only judge what you do.”

Do you suspect Douglas may have a slightly different way of looking at pride than what you’ve been taught? That would be surprising based on what?

“Pride is about having an awareness of yourself. It’s having gratitude for yourself and being grateful for what you know.”

What difference would having pride make in your life? It would eliminate the necessity and possibility of judging yourself. Judgment of any kind creates huge limitations. How many limitations in your life would you eliminate if you were to choose being proud of yourself rather than judging yourself?

Having pride could have a major effect on your relationships, for example. “If you have pride you won’t choose people that will make you less to have sex with. You will see the value of you in a relationship instead of trying to negate you in the relationship. Just because someone wants you won’t be enough for you to choose to have sex with them. If you have pride, you will choose people who will be grateful to have you in their lives, not someone who would want you to do what they want you to do.

Are you beating yourself up for mistakes you have made? Pride can enable you to give that up! “Look at when you did something you knew you shouldn’t do and you did it anyway,” suggests Douglas. “It turned out exactly as you knew it would. That was your knowing! You should be proud that you can know that much. Instead, you go, ‘That was a stupid mistake!’ No, it wasn’t a stupid mistake; it just wasn’t your best choice! Instead, you could look at it and go, “I knew, so I must be a person who knows.”

“Proud is where you should live, not in judgment of what you didn’t do and didn’t accomplish. That’s the thing about humanoids—you’ll always look for what you didn’t accomplish long before you look for what you did accomplish!”

Having pride could give you a lot more confidence in your choices. “If you had pride in you, you would trust you, because you’d know that whatever you chose would always turn out greater than you thought it would.”

“If most of you look, you would find that most of what you chose turned out greater than you thought it would. Yet you don’t trust you to choose something greater, you always look for the worst-case scenario. You always go to that first. It’s not wanting to be as great as you are. If you were as great as you are, you’d have no more justification for the failure you would rather have than the success you could have.”

Being proud can create some choices you might not expect if you come from the points of view of this reality. “A vulnerability comes with it,” Douglas observes, “as in, how did I get so lucky?’”

Being proud does not imply superiority. On the contrary, Douglas wishes more people would be the pride of themselves so he would have more playmates. “If everyone would be the proud-dom that they can be, then there would be people who would be fun to hang out with and were worth knowing because they would be willing to be greater than they think they can be.”

Being proud also eliminates the need to defend yourself for or against anything. “Most of us defend for the rightness of our point of view or against people that we think might hurt us. That’s not having pride in yourself and being aware of what you’re capable of. Proud-dom is that kingdom where you know what you’re capable of and you will choose it because you can and for no other reason.”

Giving up defense and its brother, justification, is in your best interest if freedom is your target. “Any time you’re justifying, you’re defending for or against. Anything you defend for or against becomes the thing that owns you, not the place where you have choice.” When you defend or justify anything, you are subject to its rules, it is not subject to your rules. Anywhere you’re defending for or against anything, you don’t have all of you.”

Would you be willing to grab back that pride that went before the falls you had in the past? It might be in your best interest.

“Happiness does not exist in someone who is not proud. Proud gives you the awareness of you which allows you to be happy?”