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Enough!

How to Liberate Yourself and Remake the World With Just One Word

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

Together We Rise!

Three years ago, I received the five-sentence Enough Message. Although it stood out in certain ways, downloads like this weren't all that unusual for me. I had received messages before. I started to refer to them as "divine downloads," as they differed from my own thoughts in ways that were easily recognizable by their unique energy and their rapid, uninterrupted flow. Whatever form these encounters took — a song, a poem, a phrase, a whole story — they were always accompanied by a soft feeling I can only describe as love — expansive, benevolent, deeply connected, and nurturing. I would feel a kind of ripeness in the moment and that would be my signal to just relax and pay close inner attention. Then something would begin to flow through. I by no means feel that I am special to receive these messages. On the contrary, I think the ability to do so is much more commonplace than many of us would care to admit. These experiences defy logical scrutiny and contradict the widely accepted idea that we are alone and separate. We seem to be much more comfortable labeling them as rare and special, an aberration, something only certain people can experience. But as I will reveal in multiple ways throughout this book, these messages are anything but rare or restricted. They are an integral part of who we are, proof that we are and always have been much more than enough.

We are currently living in what I call the Never Enough Story, a cultural myth characterized by ideas of separation, unworthiness, and scarcity. It is a culture that indoctrinates each and every one of us to the idea that we are separate, on our own, and there is never enough to go around. By extrapolation, this also means we are not enough, and we never will be. We are taught to believe that we are flawed beings, lacking in talent, perseverance, initiative, discipline, or wisdom. We must strive to overcome our inadequacies. We must work to prove we are worthy; prove that we can compete and win. We must also exchange precious time and energy to accumulate material objects that will serve as tangible proof to the world of our worthiness.

This is the Never Enough culture creating an illusion of a less connected, less abundant, less helpful universe than I know actually exists. What I know is that we are far more precious, divine, wise, and gifted than we allow ourselves to believe. What I know is that we do not need to be manipulated, tricked, or coerced into being productive or "good." If we were completely free to choose, it would be our greatest joy and our most natural impulse to bring maximum value to the world.

Divine Inspiration: Our Hidden Source of Abundance

Why do I believe human beings are inherently good? Many famous thinkers and artists throughout history — Socrates, William Shakespeare, Johann Sebastian Bach, Thomas Jefferson, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and John Lennon, to name a few — have openly acknowledged a direct connection to divine source. Both the ancient Greeks and Romans had a word to describe the "spirit," which they believed spoke to people and brought them in-spir(it)-ation. The Greek term for this, daemon, has since been associated with evil, while the Roman term, genius, has been reduced to refer only to one's IQ. If the original translation of these terms had been preserved, we would recall that divine inspiration requires no effort and is not earned. It is freely offered to anyone who is open to receiving this connection. This important detail is central to understanding the Enough Message, because the abundance we seek can be found in subtle and deeply subjective places that the Never Enough culture would never take seriously. And yet, the survival of our species may depend on us taking these sources very seriously. We are enough to solve any practical problem before us because the fullness of who we are includes divine in-spir(it)-ation, our ability to source unanticipated grace and genius directly. It is the hidden key, our ruby slippers.

A Word with a Hidden Message

As a poignant example of how transformative, timely, and surprising the Enough Message can be, as I was writing this book, it occurred to me that it was incredibly bold to write a book about one word without investigating its etymology. As illustrated by the words daemon and genius, learning the origins of a word can reveal enlightening information that has been hidden for a very long time. I had hoped this would be the case with enough.

I couldn't have been more delighted about what I found: In the original meaning of the word enough was a crystal clear pronouncement of humanity's collective liberation! Enough has its roots in the 1300s Old English word genog, which is a compound of ge- meaning "with, together" and –nah, "to reach or obtain." In Hittite, the root is –ninikzi, which means "lifts, raises."

Together we rise!

Together with divine inspiration. Together with one another. This points to our inherent enoughness as beings who are inseparable from and essential to the whole of humanity, the whole of nature, and the whole of spirit. We belong to one another, to Earth, to the whole that can never be complete without us. We are enough because the whole to which we belong is and always has been enough. We are recovering the deep sense of belonging that has been stripped away from us by the narrow-sighted Never Enough cultural paradigm. The Enough Message is coming to the surface of our collective consciousness to assist us in understanding the scope and dynamic of humanity's planetary transition. The days of the lone wolf are over. We belong. We are enough. Together we rise!

Leaving no doubt of "Together we rise!" was the unique circumstance in which the Enough Message came into my life. I had always received divine downloads when I was alone and considered them private messages, but the Enough Message appeared while in the presence of Ann Landaas Smith, a leader in the women's circle movement. As the message came through me, it did so with a tremendous amount of energy. Ann felt it and reacted in a way that told her the Enough Message hit an important and timely chord and needed to be shared. Ann is a woman of action. She has served as a delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women for thirty years. As the former director of International Women's Programs for the Episcopal Church, she had accumulated a global, multicultural perspective about what women need and want and what it takes to empower feminine leadership. Her presence with me in that moment was no accident. I got the message. Together we rise!

It took me about a week to gain clarity about my role in serving the Enough Message. I would write about it. As I worked with the Enough Message, it became a compelling mystery to unfold. It had much deeper layers than its initial simplicity revealed. Those deeper layers surfaced through an organic blend of synchronicities, research, scientific data, help from others, and divine guidance. I very soon realized that volunteering for this assignment meant that I would become just as much a student of the Enough Message as an interpreter.

We Are Learning to Right Ourselves

I am happiest when I am thinking outside the box, looking for connections between science and spirituality, the head and the heart, the indigenous and the innovative. My tools are just as likely to be meditation, a walk in nature, and deep listening as research, story collection, and data analysis. I believe this is the kind of full-spectrum work that a shift of paradigms asks us to do. We look for meaning amid the chaos and breakdown. We find the steady cord of aliveness tugging at the human spirit, urging us onward and often into unexpected places of the heart, body, and mind.

What I have come to understand is that when the mainstream only consults the intellect without also consulting intuition and heart-knowing, we miss a great deal of the picture. Intuition, our innate capacity to sense solutions from a holistic, instantly knowing perspective, looks too effortless to garner the respect of the Never Enough establishment. And yet, heads without hearts are what have gotten us into messes such as climate disruption, war, poverty, and ecosystem collapse. Heads without hearts cannot perceive wholeness, and tend to assume we are not responsible to a larger, interconnected, and interdependent family of living beings. Our gridlocked political and economic systems have revealed their inability and their unwillingness to serve the well-being of the whole. When the information we use to make decisions is referenced only from the same old Never Enough mindset, we can only repeat the errors of the past rather than create the world we truly want.

Luckily, the entire world, including human consciousness, is constantly evolving. What passed our notice yesterday piques our interest and invites scrutiny today. Everywhere we see evidence of humanity breaking through the boundaries between the head and the heart. Quantum science is a leader in this understanding and has confirmed we are connected at all times with the vast intelligence of the universe. For example, we've learned that something like a "big bang" occurred not only once at the birth of the universe but also occurs at the quantum level each time nonlocal energy becomes a "solid" particle in a flash of light, underscoring that the seen and unseen are part of a larger nested process that we are only beginning to comprehend.

We are also just beginning to understand the profound intimacy we share with this larger nested system. Scientists have confirmed that the big bang process occurs in our own brains when a neuron fires. A thought arises from the nonlocal plenum and through the firing of unique patterns of neurons in the brain (big bangs) creates a new a thought form "from nothing." When we have a novel thought or insight, and then act upon it, we literally are creating form from formlessness, directly and intimately acting as co-creators of something entirely new in the universe. This is why, when asked the location of the center of the universe, a quantum physicist is likely to say, "Everywhere!"

Quantum physicists discovered another amazing fact: When they conducted the famous double-slit experiment with quantum particles, they noticed that the behavior of the particles and where they appeared were influenced by the presence of a human observer. What is known as the observer effect in quantum physics reveals that the world is not made up of autonomous particles suspended in empty space. What we had previously thought of as empty space separating observer and observed is actually teaming with consciousness, a virtual network of energy and information exchanges that connect the observer and the observed. We are far more magical and inwardly abundant than we realize, hardly the lowly, disempowered, "not enough" creatures we have been taught to believe that we are. Clearly, a deeply intimate co-creative relationship with the cosmos is baked into us as human beings, one we have yet to fully utilize.

A Heart-Led Revolution

A paradigm shift is an incredibly significant thing. By all accounts, we have not had a major paradigm shift in over five thousand years. Two hundred generations is plenty of time to develop amnesia about what came before our current paradigm. It is not surprising, then, that we would make the perceptual error of assuming that the Never Enough Story is the only story humanity has ever lived or ever could live. We owe an incredible debt to the indigenous wisdom keepers who have preserved the stories of a much older paradigm. Through their perspective as well as that of cutting-edge science, we are realizing that in terms of the 13.8-billion-year-old universe story, as well as the 4.4-million-year-old hominid story, the very new 5,000-year-old Never Enough Story represents only an infinitesimal blink in time, not the big story or the only story at all.

What story will come next? We tend to expect that something as big as a paradigm shift must involve a drawn-out and perhaps violent revolution. I don't believe this has to be the case at all. These expectations come from within a Never Enough mindset and not from the broader understanding that the Enough Message offers. The emerging paradigm is not just the next in the long string of revolutionary power shifts we have seen over the course of millennia. The Enough paradigm is a different story entirely, one that does not create change through violence, war, power, competition, tribalism, and force, but negates these less evolved tendencies through a greater awareness of love and interconnectedness. Enough is very much a quiet heart-led revolution arising from the inside out, and this is perhaps why it has taken us so long to recognize it as a revolution. Many will not see it coming and will be surprised to find out who will lead the change.

What the Enough Message has taught me is this: We are a whole which is perpetually reaching toward a more profound and loving awareness of itself, a formerly Never Enough culture waking up to its much broader, ever-present roots in Enoughness. As we welcome expanded heart awareness, the answers that come to us are increasingly holistic and collectively harmonious. They are natural and loving. They unlock our joy, creativity, and sense of belonging. We are enough to awaken to our full potential as co-creators of the better world we imagine. This is the mission of the Enough Message. It is my assignment. I hope it may, in some way that is completely unique to you, become your assignment as well.

A Message to the Reader

Throughout this book, Enough capitalized will represent the information contained within the Enough Message. Terms such as the Enough Story, the Enough Message, the Enough worldview, and the Enough paradigm will be used interchangeably and all mean the same thing: the New Story for humanity described by the Enough Message. I will also capitalize the terms Never Enough and Not Enough and use them to denote the old worldview, old paradigm, or Old Story that is breaking down. When enough appears lowercased, it indicates that it is being used simply as an adjective, as in "enough said."

I begin several chapters with a quote. If I have not attributed it to anyone, it has been excerpted from this book.

The Enough Message

We are not hopeless optimists but humanity's best hope.

When I received the Enough Message, it streamed in as five rapid-fire sentences:

I am enough.

I have enough.

We are enough.

We have enough.

Enough!

It felt profoundly right. But why? How was it different from a pleasant mantra? I could feel the skeptic in me creeping in. It appeared in the form of Stuart Smalley, the Saturday Night Live self-help character popularized by comedian Al Franken, saying in a folksy accent, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and dog-gone it, people like me." After I stopped giggling at the image of Stewart, I could not deny that the Enough Message had been accompanied by an instant feeling of profound recognition, a kind of "home signal." But why? A timely statement from one of Enough's earliest supporters, filmmaker Cheryl Gould, kept me from doubting, urging me to stay awake to the deeper knowing that this message is important and to be taken seriously: "Your work will crack the code of the sleeping consciousness." I could feel the truth of that even though I didn't have the faintest idea I — or any of us — had been asleep.

When a new idea is presented to me, I have learned to apply what Buddhists call beginner's mind, something I started to do more consciously as a result of my graduate training in transformational learning. A basic tenet of transformational learning is to open oneself to new perspectives without prejudging. After receiving sufficient experience and information through a "What if this is true?" attitude and a hands-on approach, one discerns if the new perspective is useful or not, transformative or not. More than understand the words of the Enough Message, I could feel them. I felt an incredibly loving and urgent nudge. When I feel something this strongly, I know to stay open to exploring it further. I remembered that the last time I felt this was from experiencing a profound spiritual download years before. In that experience, a beautiful and benevolent energy had poured into my body from the top of my head like a shower of loving light. I knew the Enough Message, which felt similar, could be trusted. In contrast, the usual usage of the word enough had the feeling of something harsh, unkind, dismissive, and prescribed: "You are not enough!" There was such a difference between these two feelings. Enough without the "not" felt so much better.

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Excerpted from Enough! by Laurie McCammon. Copyright © 2016 Laurie McCammon. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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