I had another dream last night. This one had two characters in it that I'm sure I have used before. It makes me wonder how many times we dream and re-dream with the same characters and stories, perhaps trying to get it right? Something to think about.
This dream was a kind of late '70s retread. It took place in a fancy and spacious mall, on the top floor, near a railing and set of escalators leading down. It was a large open area, like a food court, with nobody else around.
The characters were a man, a woman, and me. The man was some kind of minor super-villain and the woman was his lieutenant. She was about 40-ish, tough, attractive, in that super-villainess sort of way, and was trying to persuade me into doing something. The man was short, maybe 5'3, older, well built and dressed, in a '70s way, in a colorful, long sleeve shirt and slacks. The woman was also dressed colorfully and well.
The plot of the dream was that they had been leaning on me to stick to the rules and do what they wanted. But I had decided that I had had enough. I wasn't afraid of them any more and I could do what I liked. To prove it, I managed to get up behind the man, grab him under the arms and swing him around and around in a circle. That's were the dream ended.
As I said, this feels like I've dealt with these two before and this was the conclusion dream where I stand up to them, stamp Paid on their bullying and am now free of their intimidation. The meaning of this dream seems pretty clear, unlike most of my dreams. Those two people represent all the people and institutions have been afraid of most of my life. You know, them, they, some people, the adult booggy-monsters of today's world that some people trot out whenever they think your getting out of line. As in "They won't like that." "They won't approve." "They will get your fired or ruin your career." Or my personal favorite: "If you say that some people won't like it, not me of course, but some people... you know."
Most of my life I never questioned the wisdom of them. They were just always there, all around me, like when I wondered if they liked me or not, or did I say the wrong thing and upset them. It's bad enough when others do it to you, but it's so much worse when you do it to yourself. You internalize this fiction so completely that you never question whether they, in fact, exist, and you never think to wonder how do you, or anyone, know what they want, and don't want, anyhow?
I puzzled over this for a long time. It seemed to me that the rules that everybody knew, were completely arbitrary and changed wherever you went. If there were definite, unquestionable rules of behavior, why didn't everybody know the same ones? Then one day the answer emerged, there are no rules, and the people that are telling you what they want or what some people will think or do, are pretty much making it all up. Of course, they will deny that, six ways from Sunday, and they actually believe, on some level, that out there, somewhere, there is some great book of Da Rules where every correct behavior is codified and cross-referenced, and their version is the only correct one.
With freedom comes responsibility. (Where have I heard that before?) Knowing all that stuff in made up makes you free to make your own choices. You get to choose what makes the most sense to you, and you get to change your mind whenever you want. That know that last bit sent chills of horror down the spine of every right-thinking authoritarian: "How dare you change the rules! Rules are rules! You can't just change them whenever you want!" They hate freedom.
The tyranny of they. The use of an unnamed, unknowable, authority to lend credibility to whatever is said. Recognize that for the empty noise that it is, and you unshackle your mind. Allow yourself the chance to see and understand what truly is, not what the narrow-minded want there to be.
Friday, October 31, 2014
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Understanding Doesn't Always Come Easy
Today I have three things to talk about. I know they are linked together in some way, it just hasn't become clear to me yet exactly how.
A few days ago I had an image come to me near the end of my daily meditation. I call her the Blue Lady. What I saw was a face, near the left edge of my field of view, facing me in three-quarters profile. The face was a feather. I don't know how else to say it, it was a big, royal blue feather and face at the same time. If you can imagine a big, blue, oval-shaped, feather with the edges all fuzzy and downey, then imagine it's a face with the quill running down the center of the forehead and nose, and two large, dark eyes. I just know it was a "she," and she looked like she was amused about something.
As I watched, she pursed her lips and blew, like she was blowing out a candle. A few moments later a cool, almost cold, breeze blew across my body. (I was in a small room with the door and window closed) There was something else going on in the foreground, but I can't remember what it was. But the image of that face sticks clearly in my mind.
Now on to other items. Last night I had two dreams, here is the first: I was a middle-aged man, standing on the corner of an intersection. This intersection looked brand new, with wide streets, curbs and fancy stoplights, but there were no building anywhere in sight. The terrain was rolling, grass-covered hills, stretching in all directions. It was to be right around sunset, and the air was crisp and clean, like right after a rain. The sky was full of dark, heavy, clouds. I was standing in the grass at one corner of the intersection, facing diagonally across it. I could see, several miles away, a cluster of lights that suggested some buildings or a small town.
I first I was alone. Then I began to notice that the wind was picking up with the definite feel of a storm coming on. Then I made up my mind and "Ok, it's time to go!" I was talking to a group of about 5-6 people that were now scattered across the intersection, all dressed in uniform-like work clothes. I was standing at the bottom of a small hill, and, as I turned to walk up it, I could see the bright lights of what looked like a fancy, modern, gas station, at the top. But I knew it was actually a small airport.
In the next scene, we are inside our "plane." I feel that it looked an old-fashioned looking biplane, but was quite large. Inside it was made of lacy aluminum struts, like the inside of a Zeppelin. There was plenty of room and two pilot seats. I was no longer the captain, but a young woman, a rookie, and the captain was telling me to take the co-pilot's seat as we got ready to leave. We needed to get out of there before the weather got too bad.
Next dream: I was at a small complex of modern-looking, multi-storied, company buildings, located in some hills in a pine forest. It was night. For some reason, I needed to get into one of the buildings. I was waiting in a bathroom when some guys came in. One carrying box of, what looked like, a set of telephoto lenses packed in form-fitting foam. He put the box on a sink and went into one of the stalls. I thought, for some reason, that having one of those lenses would allow me to get into the building I wanted, so I took one.
Later, I was walking along the edge of the trees, looking down into one of the buildings where I could see people moving around through the glass walls. I was having second thoughts. I was thinking that having the lens was very dangerous and I should get rid of it and get out of there. I decide to just stick the lens in a tree and leave. I had some trouble getting the lens to stay on the branch where I put it. I ended up propping it up with some twigs and wood chips.
Later still. I was standing on a dark road, outside the building complex, talking to the man I stole the lens from. It turns out that the lens was very valuable, and he was in all kinds of trouble because he lost one. I wanted to strike a deal with him, I would tell him where I left the lens if he promised not to mention my involvement. He was reluctant and I was thinking I should have wiped my fingerprints off before I stashed the lens. At this point the dream devolved into a long series of "what ifs" as I tried to figure out a way out of the situation without getting in trouble.
After I woke up, I laid there and pondered for a while. I noticed that certain words seemed to point to something. Words like "forest", "steal", "dark", "Germany", and "lens", seemed to have a connection with a discomfort I was feeling in my abdomen, just below my stomach. I dug at that for a while, or meditated, or pondered, use whatever term you like, and it seemed like I was getting close to something, beginning to build a picture of what it was all about, when everything shifted.
These are the times when I just want to throw my arm and yell in frustration. "I was SO close!" And now it's gone again! Ug! Ug! Ug! Well, there's nothing to do about it but start all over again, but I shortly realized is was time to get up. I would have to ponder this later, and put up with the discomfort, for however long it lasts, until I do.
A few days ago I had an image come to me near the end of my daily meditation. I call her the Blue Lady. What I saw was a face, near the left edge of my field of view, facing me in three-quarters profile. The face was a feather. I don't know how else to say it, it was a big, royal blue feather and face at the same time. If you can imagine a big, blue, oval-shaped, feather with the edges all fuzzy and downey, then imagine it's a face with the quill running down the center of the forehead and nose, and two large, dark eyes. I just know it was a "she," and she looked like she was amused about something.
As I watched, she pursed her lips and blew, like she was blowing out a candle. A few moments later a cool, almost cold, breeze blew across my body. (I was in a small room with the door and window closed) There was something else going on in the foreground, but I can't remember what it was. But the image of that face sticks clearly in my mind.
Now on to other items. Last night I had two dreams, here is the first: I was a middle-aged man, standing on the corner of an intersection. This intersection looked brand new, with wide streets, curbs and fancy stoplights, but there were no building anywhere in sight. The terrain was rolling, grass-covered hills, stretching in all directions. It was to be right around sunset, and the air was crisp and clean, like right after a rain. The sky was full of dark, heavy, clouds. I was standing in the grass at one corner of the intersection, facing diagonally across it. I could see, several miles away, a cluster of lights that suggested some buildings or a small town.
I first I was alone. Then I began to notice that the wind was picking up with the definite feel of a storm coming on. Then I made up my mind and "Ok, it's time to go!" I was talking to a group of about 5-6 people that were now scattered across the intersection, all dressed in uniform-like work clothes. I was standing at the bottom of a small hill, and, as I turned to walk up it, I could see the bright lights of what looked like a fancy, modern, gas station, at the top. But I knew it was actually a small airport.
In the next scene, we are inside our "plane." I feel that it looked an old-fashioned looking biplane, but was quite large. Inside it was made of lacy aluminum struts, like the inside of a Zeppelin. There was plenty of room and two pilot seats. I was no longer the captain, but a young woman, a rookie, and the captain was telling me to take the co-pilot's seat as we got ready to leave. We needed to get out of there before the weather got too bad.
Next dream: I was at a small complex of modern-looking, multi-storied, company buildings, located in some hills in a pine forest. It was night. For some reason, I needed to get into one of the buildings. I was waiting in a bathroom when some guys came in. One carrying box of, what looked like, a set of telephoto lenses packed in form-fitting foam. He put the box on a sink and went into one of the stalls. I thought, for some reason, that having one of those lenses would allow me to get into the building I wanted, so I took one.
Later, I was walking along the edge of the trees, looking down into one of the buildings where I could see people moving around through the glass walls. I was having second thoughts. I was thinking that having the lens was very dangerous and I should get rid of it and get out of there. I decide to just stick the lens in a tree and leave. I had some trouble getting the lens to stay on the branch where I put it. I ended up propping it up with some twigs and wood chips.
Later still. I was standing on a dark road, outside the building complex, talking to the man I stole the lens from. It turns out that the lens was very valuable, and he was in all kinds of trouble because he lost one. I wanted to strike a deal with him, I would tell him where I left the lens if he promised not to mention my involvement. He was reluctant and I was thinking I should have wiped my fingerprints off before I stashed the lens. At this point the dream devolved into a long series of "what ifs" as I tried to figure out a way out of the situation without getting in trouble.
After I woke up, I laid there and pondered for a while. I noticed that certain words seemed to point to something. Words like "forest", "steal", "dark", "Germany", and "lens", seemed to have a connection with a discomfort I was feeling in my abdomen, just below my stomach. I dug at that for a while, or meditated, or pondered, use whatever term you like, and it seemed like I was getting close to something, beginning to build a picture of what it was all about, when everything shifted.
These are the times when I just want to throw my arm and yell in frustration. "I was SO close!" And now it's gone again! Ug! Ug! Ug! Well, there's nothing to do about it but start all over again, but I shortly realized is was time to get up. I would have to ponder this later, and put up with the discomfort, for however long it lasts, until I do.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Shields Up Scotty!
Visit to the park, continued.
After Top Gun it was time for dinner. Park food was just not an option. We left the park and walked to an Irish pub. The map said it would take 20 minutes, and, sure enough, it took us 20 minuted to get there and discover that it was closed for remodeling. Yay for smart-phones, we were able to find another place nearby that was actually open at five on a Sunday night, and wasn't fast food. We had a couple of hours before the Haunt part opened, so we ate Sports Bar food, drank, and hung out. We got back to the park around 9 pm, after dark. Let the fun begin.
The thing about these "Haunts" is that they are small, confusing, loud, dark, smoky and you never know when someone is jump out or scream at you. I may be old, but the stress of never knowing when something is going to happen gives me a headache after a while. I know everyone goes in with different expectations. My daughter, for instance, worked in that kind of place for a couple of years, so she goes in with a kind of professional interest, scoping out the tricks and techniques. Other kids go in vowing not to be "scared," and they usually lose. Which isn't surprising since you don't get frighted in these places, just startled, and reacting to sudden, loud noises is build in to our DNA.
Anyway, ever since the first ride, I had been feeling sick. Even after dinner I still had a kind of woozy, light-headedness and ear ringing, and a bit of a tension headache. Later, after several Haunts and lots of unbelievably loud music and sound effects, I still felt about the same. I just wanted to leave, but I knew the others wouldn't go for that, so I stuck it out. And I was also feeling a bit left out, my wife and daughter were having a tight thing going on that I just couldn't relate to, and it was so loud I couldn't hear them anyway. Next time, I'll let them go alone.
While waiting in line for a Haunt, I began to think that the energy of the place was getting to me and maybe it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself and focus outward, instead. So I started people-watching instead of complaining to myself and that passed the time a bit better. In the line to the next Haunt, I got the idea that I could put a "shield" around myself. I could try, anyway, what could it hurt, and it would pass the time, since I was left to my own devices. So, I imagined an "energy shield" around me. White light, but I didn't really give it a shape, just sort of a circle around me. I didn't put a lot of effort into it, just "pretending" it was there and protecting me from the "stuff" outside. The funny thing is, it worked. Within a couple of minutes, my headache was gone and the foggy, wooziness lifted. I was still a little light-headed, but that turned out to be lack of food. It's a problem these days. I don't really get hungry and, if I get busy, I just forget to eat. And when I do eat, I don't eat anywhere as much as I used to.
Did the shield thing actually do anything, was it "real?" Maybe I felt better just because it was a way of having some control over my environment. I noticed throughout the evening that I have a need for control that can cause me a lot of stress when thwarted, and that day I was totally at the mercy of my companions and had no decisions to make. Nice in some ways, stressful in others. On the other hand, maybe there really is energy in these places, packed with people, and I've gotten more sensitive to it. Especially when I'm hungry. I now need to habitually protect myself with energy techniques. I used to have solid emotional shields around my feelings. But now I've stripped those away, I need other ways to keep out the emotional, i.e. energy, noise of the everyday world. So shields it is.
After Top Gun it was time for dinner. Park food was just not an option. We left the park and walked to an Irish pub. The map said it would take 20 minutes, and, sure enough, it took us 20 minuted to get there and discover that it was closed for remodeling. Yay for smart-phones, we were able to find another place nearby that was actually open at five on a Sunday night, and wasn't fast food. We had a couple of hours before the Haunt part opened, so we ate Sports Bar food, drank, and hung out. We got back to the park around 9 pm, after dark. Let the fun begin.
The thing about these "Haunts" is that they are small, confusing, loud, dark, smoky and you never know when someone is jump out or scream at you. I may be old, but the stress of never knowing when something is going to happen gives me a headache after a while. I know everyone goes in with different expectations. My daughter, for instance, worked in that kind of place for a couple of years, so she goes in with a kind of professional interest, scoping out the tricks and techniques. Other kids go in vowing not to be "scared," and they usually lose. Which isn't surprising since you don't get frighted in these places, just startled, and reacting to sudden, loud noises is build in to our DNA.
Anyway, ever since the first ride, I had been feeling sick. Even after dinner I still had a kind of woozy, light-headedness and ear ringing, and a bit of a tension headache. Later, after several Haunts and lots of unbelievably loud music and sound effects, I still felt about the same. I just wanted to leave, but I knew the others wouldn't go for that, so I stuck it out. And I was also feeling a bit left out, my wife and daughter were having a tight thing going on that I just couldn't relate to, and it was so loud I couldn't hear them anyway. Next time, I'll let them go alone.
While waiting in line for a Haunt, I began to think that the energy of the place was getting to me and maybe it was time to stop feeling sorry for myself and focus outward, instead. So I started people-watching instead of complaining to myself and that passed the time a bit better. In the line to the next Haunt, I got the idea that I could put a "shield" around myself. I could try, anyway, what could it hurt, and it would pass the time, since I was left to my own devices. So, I imagined an "energy shield" around me. White light, but I didn't really give it a shape, just sort of a circle around me. I didn't put a lot of effort into it, just "pretending" it was there and protecting me from the "stuff" outside. The funny thing is, it worked. Within a couple of minutes, my headache was gone and the foggy, wooziness lifted. I was still a little light-headed, but that turned out to be lack of food. It's a problem these days. I don't really get hungry and, if I get busy, I just forget to eat. And when I do eat, I don't eat anywhere as much as I used to.
Did the shield thing actually do anything, was it "real?" Maybe I felt better just because it was a way of having some control over my environment. I noticed throughout the evening that I have a need for control that can cause me a lot of stress when thwarted, and that day I was totally at the mercy of my companions and had no decisions to make. Nice in some ways, stressful in others. On the other hand, maybe there really is energy in these places, packed with people, and I've gotten more sensitive to it. Especially when I'm hungry. I now need to habitually protect myself with energy techniques. I used to have solid emotional shields around my feelings. But now I've stripped those away, I need other ways to keep out the emotional, i.e. energy, noise of the everyday world. So shields it is.
Monday, October 27, 2014
Great American Haunt
Last night I went to the California's Great America "Haunt" with my wife and daughter. It's a special halloween event for Great America. It's funny to call it "California's Great America," those us who have been around for a while know it under lots of names. It was Marriott's Great America, then Paramount's Great America, and maybe something else as well when I wasn't paying attention. I liked when Paramount had it and fill it with the movie-themed rides, decorations and music, too bad they decided that they weren't making enough money and pulled out. The place is now that much more dull.
I wasn't really sure that I wanted to go, but my wife and daughter were going and I'd never been, so I thought I'd give it a try. I don't like that place all the much these days. We were went on a Sunday, and I found out that day the they'd decided to arrive there at 2 pm and stay till midnight. Not what I'd signed up for! Whatever, Ok and off we went.
When the park first opened, I was as excited as any other kid. Well, I wasn't exactly a kid. Since it opened in 1976, when I was two years out of high school. I seem to have memories of going with my brother Mark, but that can't be right because he was long gone at that point. I must have gone with friends, but I remember who. I probably went with church groups sometimes, and my high school buddies at others. But I have no clear idea which ones. Anyway, like mosts guys that age, parks were all about the rides and shows were just a waste of precious time.
In a way, I don't really know why I wanted to go on the rides. They scared me. Some, like The Edge, I just couldn't take and didn't go on for years. I remember when I went to Disneyland for the first time and rode the Matterhorn, I left serious dents in the safety bar from my hands gripping so tightly. That was about the time that I figured out that is was less scary if I kept my eyes open: I could see what was coming. Apparently I had a real fear of falling, that I'd had since...well, ever.
When I was about five, I was having a series of falling dreams that woke me up. I only remember the last one of the series. In that dream, I was falling in grayness toward something awful, and I realized that if I closed my eyes I'd be safe. I was really scared to close my eyes, but I did it anyway and, as I held them closed, the falling feeling faded away and I found myself comfortably on the ground. I never had a falling dream again. That's a recurring theme in my life, control. Once I feel that I have an understanding of something, I had control and I was safe. I real life though, closing my eyes never really worked out all the well.
Despite my fear, I was always excited to go to parks and ride the rides, no matter what. Perhaps it was a way of testing my limits, but it was always really cool. And all the other guys did it too, so there's that.
Now, many years later, something has happened. I don't know when it happened, but it really hit me a few years back when my youngest daughter talked me into going on The Drop Zone.That's a ride where they drop you, straight down, around 200 feet. I discovered that I actually enjoyed the feeling of weightlessness! At that point it really clicked that none of the rides scared me any more, and the only things that kept them from being totally fun were the way many of them jerked and slammed you around and the fact that they now tend to make me sick. The jerking and slamming just plain hurts. I know the ride manufactures say that the roughness of the rides makes them more exiting, but I really care. I used to tense up on rides because I was scared, now I have to tense up to protect myself from bruises and sprains. I remember one ride at Universal Studios where my head was slammed into the side of the car whenever it jerked left. I spend most of the ride with my hands holding my head trying to keep it from hitting the car. I don't know what the designers were thinking.
Yeah, I now get nauseous on most rides. Not fun. I figured that was just what happened when you got older, but it occurred to me last night that maybe that's not necessarily true. Maybe it's not inevitable. When I was riding Top Gun I was reminded of how they teach fighter pilots to resist blacking out from high G forces and maybe a variation on that could help raise my tolerance for nausea. Maybe the way you tense up when you're young helps, in some way, and when you relax as you get older, you lose that protection. I played with that idea on the ride, but since it was the last ride of the day my head was already swimming, so I don't know if I improved things or not.
Wow, this has gone on a lot longer that I thought it might and I need to wrap up now. And I never even got to my main point. I'll pick this up tomorrow.
I wasn't really sure that I wanted to go, but my wife and daughter were going and I'd never been, so I thought I'd give it a try. I don't like that place all the much these days. We were went on a Sunday, and I found out that day the they'd decided to arrive there at 2 pm and stay till midnight. Not what I'd signed up for! Whatever, Ok and off we went.
When the park first opened, I was as excited as any other kid. Well, I wasn't exactly a kid. Since it opened in 1976, when I was two years out of high school. I seem to have memories of going with my brother Mark, but that can't be right because he was long gone at that point. I must have gone with friends, but I remember who. I probably went with church groups sometimes, and my high school buddies at others. But I have no clear idea which ones. Anyway, like mosts guys that age, parks were all about the rides and shows were just a waste of precious time.
In a way, I don't really know why I wanted to go on the rides. They scared me. Some, like The Edge, I just couldn't take and didn't go on for years. I remember when I went to Disneyland for the first time and rode the Matterhorn, I left serious dents in the safety bar from my hands gripping so tightly. That was about the time that I figured out that is was less scary if I kept my eyes open: I could see what was coming. Apparently I had a real fear of falling, that I'd had since...well, ever.
When I was about five, I was having a series of falling dreams that woke me up. I only remember the last one of the series. In that dream, I was falling in grayness toward something awful, and I realized that if I closed my eyes I'd be safe. I was really scared to close my eyes, but I did it anyway and, as I held them closed, the falling feeling faded away and I found myself comfortably on the ground. I never had a falling dream again. That's a recurring theme in my life, control. Once I feel that I have an understanding of something, I had control and I was safe. I real life though, closing my eyes never really worked out all the well.
Despite my fear, I was always excited to go to parks and ride the rides, no matter what. Perhaps it was a way of testing my limits, but it was always really cool. And all the other guys did it too, so there's that.
Now, many years later, something has happened. I don't know when it happened, but it really hit me a few years back when my youngest daughter talked me into going on The Drop Zone.That's a ride where they drop you, straight down, around 200 feet. I discovered that I actually enjoyed the feeling of weightlessness! At that point it really clicked that none of the rides scared me any more, and the only things that kept them from being totally fun were the way many of them jerked and slammed you around and the fact that they now tend to make me sick. The jerking and slamming just plain hurts. I know the ride manufactures say that the roughness of the rides makes them more exiting, but I really care. I used to tense up on rides because I was scared, now I have to tense up to protect myself from bruises and sprains. I remember one ride at Universal Studios where my head was slammed into the side of the car whenever it jerked left. I spend most of the ride with my hands holding my head trying to keep it from hitting the car. I don't know what the designers were thinking.
Yeah, I now get nauseous on most rides. Not fun. I figured that was just what happened when you got older, but it occurred to me last night that maybe that's not necessarily true. Maybe it's not inevitable. When I was riding Top Gun I was reminded of how they teach fighter pilots to resist blacking out from high G forces and maybe a variation on that could help raise my tolerance for nausea. Maybe the way you tense up when you're young helps, in some way, and when you relax as you get older, you lose that protection. I played with that idea on the ride, but since it was the last ride of the day my head was already swimming, so I don't know if I improved things or not.
Wow, this has gone on a lot longer that I thought it might and I need to wrap up now. And I never even got to my main point. I'll pick this up tomorrow.
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Subject To Change Without Notice
I wanted to call this, "A funny thing happened on the way to Openness." A little clumsy perhaps, but kind of expresses what I'm about today. What I'm thinking about is how my quest to be more open to others and be able to understand what's going on on "over there" in my relationships. And, I guess, to understand people better in general. Though, when I started, I was only thinking about how closed off I was and I figured that if I could do something about that, I would have more friends. I mean, everybody around me all seemed to have friends and be having a good time, so there should be something to all that, right?
So I worked for years to be more functional in society. To me that meant getting over my fears and my obsessive need to protect myself. I picture myself then surrounded by a clumsy red brick wall, built from the inside, so I can be safe from all the vicissitudes that life might throw at me. The wall is sloppy with the bricks all crooked and mortar oozing out from all the joints, and it's such a mess that are lots of gaps when stuff can leak through. That's me, kind of a mess.
It's odd that openness is where I was heading, for I never really thought about it that way. I just wanted to stop being so afraid. To stop all the second guessing and self recriminations that ruled all my social interactions. And to find a way to not be so lonely. At the time I couldn't have any friends and I didn't really understand why. Now I see that I trusted people so little that I had to wear a thick facade when I dealt with anyone. I had to try so hard to be..., you know, I don't know what I was trying to be. But whatever it was, it was hard and left me drained and with a headache, if it wen't on too long. In essence, I really had no idea what I was doing when I set out to change, I just didn't want to pretend any more.
Time goes by and slowly I ratcheted down the fears and self-doubts. The two seem to go hand in hand, you can't really make progress on one without improving the other as well. Here's an interesting thing I've noticed, lack of self-doubt doesn't imply self confidence. Nor does having self confidence mean you have no doubts. They are related but not inverses of each other. On my journey, I found it much easier to deal with the doubts and fears first, and let the confidence grow with experience. I have always been uncomfortable with positive affirmations of confidence that ignore my fears and doubts. Your milage may vary.
At some point, I notice that the fears have dissipated significantly and I was able to raise my head and look around a bit. Sort of like I'd begun to take down my brick wall. Not all of it, but down to chest high, say. I relaxed a lot in dealing with other people and thought, this is cool! But, you know what? Nothing changed. I'd pulled down my wall and nobody attacked me, but nobody came to me either. In fact, nobody seemed to notice. That just didn't seem right.
"Maybe I don't quite get it yet," I thought. So I kept on doing what I was doing. Time goes by and I slowing pull down the wall a bit further and become it bit more adventurous. Now the wall is down to about waist high and I can reach out to other people. Now things get even more odd. People who I thought were "safe" are now treating me a bit odd and seem somewhat uncomfortable around me. Others get hostile, in a passive-agressve way, at my change in behavior. In a way, it's like I was standing, naked, in the middle of a crowd of friends and family and most of them don't seem to even notice.
At one point I start doing theater again, after twenty-odd years, and, suddenly everything was different. None of the people I met doing shows had ever known me before. They had no preconceived ideas of what I was supposed to be and no stake in me being one way or another. Then the lightbulb went on! People who have known you forever will always treat you as who they think you are, not who you actually are. This is the way most people work, I think, they form an impression when they meet you and, from then on, that's who you are. If you change, well, then you are still "you," but acting different, sometimes. Some will never see you change. Some see it and will try to convince you that it's "wrong" and work to to get you back to "normal." And others will move away from you. If you're lucky, you will have some enlightened friends or family that will see your changes as progress and will rejoice with you. I didn't have any of those type of friends. So around family I tend to "put my light under a bushel" to keep the peace, for it really doesn't make any difference anyway.
If I ever truly manage to pull my wall down all the way to the ground, I am going to need a whole new batch of friends. Ones that I can relate to and who can understand who I am now and where I'm going. I am not a fixed point. So, if you're going to be my friend, you need to accept and rejoice in the fact that while my height and eye color will be as they are, everything else is subject to change without notice.
So I worked for years to be more functional in society. To me that meant getting over my fears and my obsessive need to protect myself. I picture myself then surrounded by a clumsy red brick wall, built from the inside, so I can be safe from all the vicissitudes that life might throw at me. The wall is sloppy with the bricks all crooked and mortar oozing out from all the joints, and it's such a mess that are lots of gaps when stuff can leak through. That's me, kind of a mess.
It's odd that openness is where I was heading, for I never really thought about it that way. I just wanted to stop being so afraid. To stop all the second guessing and self recriminations that ruled all my social interactions. And to find a way to not be so lonely. At the time I couldn't have any friends and I didn't really understand why. Now I see that I trusted people so little that I had to wear a thick facade when I dealt with anyone. I had to try so hard to be..., you know, I don't know what I was trying to be. But whatever it was, it was hard and left me drained and with a headache, if it wen't on too long. In essence, I really had no idea what I was doing when I set out to change, I just didn't want to pretend any more.
Time goes by and slowly I ratcheted down the fears and self-doubts. The two seem to go hand in hand, you can't really make progress on one without improving the other as well. Here's an interesting thing I've noticed, lack of self-doubt doesn't imply self confidence. Nor does having self confidence mean you have no doubts. They are related but not inverses of each other. On my journey, I found it much easier to deal with the doubts and fears first, and let the confidence grow with experience. I have always been uncomfortable with positive affirmations of confidence that ignore my fears and doubts. Your milage may vary.
At some point, I notice that the fears have dissipated significantly and I was able to raise my head and look around a bit. Sort of like I'd begun to take down my brick wall. Not all of it, but down to chest high, say. I relaxed a lot in dealing with other people and thought, this is cool! But, you know what? Nothing changed. I'd pulled down my wall and nobody attacked me, but nobody came to me either. In fact, nobody seemed to notice. That just didn't seem right.
"Maybe I don't quite get it yet," I thought. So I kept on doing what I was doing. Time goes by and I slowing pull down the wall a bit further and become it bit more adventurous. Now the wall is down to about waist high and I can reach out to other people. Now things get even more odd. People who I thought were "safe" are now treating me a bit odd and seem somewhat uncomfortable around me. Others get hostile, in a passive-agressve way, at my change in behavior. In a way, it's like I was standing, naked, in the middle of a crowd of friends and family and most of them don't seem to even notice.
At one point I start doing theater again, after twenty-odd years, and, suddenly everything was different. None of the people I met doing shows had ever known me before. They had no preconceived ideas of what I was supposed to be and no stake in me being one way or another. Then the lightbulb went on! People who have known you forever will always treat you as who they think you are, not who you actually are. This is the way most people work, I think, they form an impression when they meet you and, from then on, that's who you are. If you change, well, then you are still "you," but acting different, sometimes. Some will never see you change. Some see it and will try to convince you that it's "wrong" and work to to get you back to "normal." And others will move away from you. If you're lucky, you will have some enlightened friends or family that will see your changes as progress and will rejoice with you. I didn't have any of those type of friends. So around family I tend to "put my light under a bushel" to keep the peace, for it really doesn't make any difference anyway.
If I ever truly manage to pull my wall down all the way to the ground, I am going to need a whole new batch of friends. Ones that I can relate to and who can understand who I am now and where I'm going. I am not a fixed point. So, if you're going to be my friend, you need to accept and rejoice in the fact that while my height and eye color will be as they are, everything else is subject to change without notice.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Why No More Clients?
I have mentioned before my growing frustration with getting my practice moving. Clients just aren't showing up, is how it appears to me. It seems strange, I have more than enough people who say they want to come, they just can't find the time, or something. I've had people make appointments and then cancel without explanation. What happens most often is that we start a conversation and then they just stop responding. No explanation. It's almost like there's an invisible wall around me that people run into when they get too close.
So my first reaction is for all my fears and insecurities to kick in, and the next is that I need to "do" something about it: Get out there, get myself known, advertise more, push more to convince people to come in, bug them more to find out why, to market myself and my services "better." That's the way we're all taught handle difficulties, right? But, on the other hand, maybe I need to stop and think for a minute.
Here's the real question: Am I ready for people to come to me? Have I made a space for them to be? Am I creating, and projecting, a welcoming and healing environment that people want to inhabit and enjoy? Well, a little self examination says "no." Ouch!
This is where the my belief work rubber meets the road: What's going on here? Time to take a look, and it doesn't take much digging to find out what's what. Here's a sample of what I found:
"I'm not ready."
"I'm afraid it won't work."
"They won't trust me. They shouldn't trust me."
"I can't make this work."
...and so on. I have a whole ecosystem around fear of incompetence, and holding myself up to public scrutiny. "Public scrutiny" is a nice way of putting it. A more accurate description would be that I have a visceral, gut feeling that if I stand up in public and take a stand, then "they" will come and rip my guts out. That's what happens when you drop your defenses. I'm not super surprised about this, I'm been nibbling around the edges of it for quite some time, but this is the first time that I've really laid it on the line and said, in a very public way: This is what I am and what I think and believe. I'm confronting my demons in a big way, and now their fighting back.
Another thing I've had to acknowledge is that I haven't finished preparing my space. I have been preparing a room for sessions, but I've allowed that to stall. I keep thinking about the things I need to do, but I keep putting them off for various reasons. So, in a very real sense, I haven't been creating the physical space I want. Another thing to note and to get moving on. I need to both tackle both getting the tasks done and looking into why I haven't been doing them. But there is no need to wait until I eliminate all my blocks before getting to work, that would be just another excuse.
Now it's also time to seriously evaluate is creating "space" for clients. This is different than a physical location. I wish I had a good word for what I mean, but space in this sense is an opening, a clearing, an attractive environment that wants something to fill it. You know how it is, an empty desk attracts clutter, and empty tables and shelves never stay that way for long. It's a law of nature that a void will be filled, and once a space that is filled will not attract more stuff. This is the same in the world of relationships. A person who is a clearing for friendship will naturally attract friends in the same way that a pleasant clearing in a forest will attract passers by to stop and enjoy the space. People who don't make space for others, tend to be by themselves most of the time.
I need to examine how well I'm being a clearing for healing and curiosity. Am I really a non-judgmental, trustworthy place where people can find help, comfort and encouragement? A place of exploration and discovery? Not so much, I expect. Yes, I am convinced that I have come a long way in that direction. But I still have a ways to go, if I'm going to have success on the path I've chosen. And here again there is no excuse for just sitting back and waiting until I'm "all enlightened" to get things done. I must keep in action. I must do the best I can with what I have and am now. I'm required by my commitments to keep the momentum going despite my misgivings, uncertainties and fears.
So my first reaction is for all my fears and insecurities to kick in, and the next is that I need to "do" something about it: Get out there, get myself known, advertise more, push more to convince people to come in, bug them more to find out why, to market myself and my services "better." That's the way we're all taught handle difficulties, right? But, on the other hand, maybe I need to stop and think for a minute.
Here's the real question: Am I ready for people to come to me? Have I made a space for them to be? Am I creating, and projecting, a welcoming and healing environment that people want to inhabit and enjoy? Well, a little self examination says "no." Ouch!
This is where the my belief work rubber meets the road: What's going on here? Time to take a look, and it doesn't take much digging to find out what's what. Here's a sample of what I found:
"I'm not ready."
"I'm afraid it won't work."
"They won't trust me. They shouldn't trust me."
"I can't make this work."
...and so on. I have a whole ecosystem around fear of incompetence, and holding myself up to public scrutiny. "Public scrutiny" is a nice way of putting it. A more accurate description would be that I have a visceral, gut feeling that if I stand up in public and take a stand, then "they" will come and rip my guts out. That's what happens when you drop your defenses. I'm not super surprised about this, I'm been nibbling around the edges of it for quite some time, but this is the first time that I've really laid it on the line and said, in a very public way: This is what I am and what I think and believe. I'm confronting my demons in a big way, and now their fighting back.
Another thing I've had to acknowledge is that I haven't finished preparing my space. I have been preparing a room for sessions, but I've allowed that to stall. I keep thinking about the things I need to do, but I keep putting them off for various reasons. So, in a very real sense, I haven't been creating the physical space I want. Another thing to note and to get moving on. I need to both tackle both getting the tasks done and looking into why I haven't been doing them. But there is no need to wait until I eliminate all my blocks before getting to work, that would be just another excuse.
Now it's also time to seriously evaluate is creating "space" for clients. This is different than a physical location. I wish I had a good word for what I mean, but space in this sense is an opening, a clearing, an attractive environment that wants something to fill it. You know how it is, an empty desk attracts clutter, and empty tables and shelves never stay that way for long. It's a law of nature that a void will be filled, and once a space that is filled will not attract more stuff. This is the same in the world of relationships. A person who is a clearing for friendship will naturally attract friends in the same way that a pleasant clearing in a forest will attract passers by to stop and enjoy the space. People who don't make space for others, tend to be by themselves most of the time.
I need to examine how well I'm being a clearing for healing and curiosity. Am I really a non-judgmental, trustworthy place where people can find help, comfort and encouragement? A place of exploration and discovery? Not so much, I expect. Yes, I am convinced that I have come a long way in that direction. But I still have a ways to go, if I'm going to have success on the path I've chosen. And here again there is no excuse for just sitting back and waiting until I'm "all enlightened" to get things done. I must keep in action. I must do the best I can with what I have and am now. I'm required by my commitments to keep the momentum going despite my misgivings, uncertainties and fears.
Friday, October 24, 2014
A Triplet of Lives Uncovered Without Regression
Today I uncovered another wrinkle in the world of past lives and healing. As background, let me say I am a little frustrated by not finding any other practitioners in my area willing to work with me and trade sessions. I have a growing list of questions I want to ask higher mind and not way to ask them. So it's not surprising that I'm looking for ways to do things on my own.
Now to my tail. For as long as I can remember, I have had the odd condition that, if I didn't pee soon enough after waking up I would get a stabbing pain in my right kidney. For most of my life, the pain wasn't too bad, and would go away as soon as I went to the bathroom. But after about fifty, the pain happened more often, was stronger, and it wouldn't always go away after going to the bathroom. So one morning, a while ago, I finally had the idea that "enough was enough" and set to work on it. I don't remember what technique I used on it, but it released pretty quickly and hasn't been back. So I counted that as a win, Yay!
However, something else has also been bothering be for about the same about of time. And that is my bladder feeling full when it's not. At first I was thinking that I was getting to "that age" and went to the doctor, he found nothing unusual. Hum. That was about five years ago. Since then a feeling has been growing more and more common, a feeling that my bladder is being squeezed or crushed. It's especially strong in the morning, but it can be there any time, these days. It used to be that I only got the feeling when I sat hunched over at a desk for a long time, or had to ride in the back of a small car. Those were the good old days!
This morning I decided to do something about it. While I was still lying in bed, when the feeling as at it's peak, I put my mind to finding out what was going on. My idea was to "look" into my body and feel the energy around it, using everything I had, looking for clues. I had a strong physical reaction when I looked, nothing unusual there, but I kept on looking and holding the space open. To me, a physical reaction usually means something is being released, so I kept it up, hoping that, as the energy dissipated, so details about the cause would appear.
Well, I picked a bad morning to try this. Since I had a morning appointment, I really couldn't spend a lot of time on it. But, I did begin to pick up something about an injury in a past life before I had to let it go and get on with my day. It wasn't until late in the afternoon that I made time to lay down and dig into it some more. What I found was not a single past life injury, but a whole series of them!
I wasn't able to find everything I needed to find, but what I did find was pretty interesting. In the first life, my pelvis was crushed by a rectangular block, bigger than I was, at some kind of construction site. I can still see the stone, it came down at an angle and pretty much cut me in half. I asked about the lesson of that life, it was Trust. I ended up where I was because I didn't trust the people I was working with.
The next life my pelvis was crushed again, this time under a castle portcullis. Something bad was going on in the castle and I was too afraid to trust the people to keep me safe, so I tried to escape and got caught and crushed going through the gate. Again, Trust was the lesson.
There was also a third life. This time I was killed by a bear in a mountain forest. I had somehow tripped or the bear had knocked me down onto my back and I watched as it clawed out my intestines down to the groin. I had lived all alone up away from everyone because I didn't like or trust anyone. So, Trust again.
I needed to take a break at this point, but I took a little while to look into my current life and, you know what? Trust is a big issue here too. Looks like I still need to work on trusting people, and I'm pretty sure that I know some of the places I need to go out on a limb, be honest, and see if I get acceptance from the people that matter.
Now to my tail. For as long as I can remember, I have had the odd condition that, if I didn't pee soon enough after waking up I would get a stabbing pain in my right kidney. For most of my life, the pain wasn't too bad, and would go away as soon as I went to the bathroom. But after about fifty, the pain happened more often, was stronger, and it wouldn't always go away after going to the bathroom. So one morning, a while ago, I finally had the idea that "enough was enough" and set to work on it. I don't remember what technique I used on it, but it released pretty quickly and hasn't been back. So I counted that as a win, Yay!
However, something else has also been bothering be for about the same about of time. And that is my bladder feeling full when it's not. At first I was thinking that I was getting to "that age" and went to the doctor, he found nothing unusual. Hum. That was about five years ago. Since then a feeling has been growing more and more common, a feeling that my bladder is being squeezed or crushed. It's especially strong in the morning, but it can be there any time, these days. It used to be that I only got the feeling when I sat hunched over at a desk for a long time, or had to ride in the back of a small car. Those were the good old days!
This morning I decided to do something about it. While I was still lying in bed, when the feeling as at it's peak, I put my mind to finding out what was going on. My idea was to "look" into my body and feel the energy around it, using everything I had, looking for clues. I had a strong physical reaction when I looked, nothing unusual there, but I kept on looking and holding the space open. To me, a physical reaction usually means something is being released, so I kept it up, hoping that, as the energy dissipated, so details about the cause would appear.
Well, I picked a bad morning to try this. Since I had a morning appointment, I really couldn't spend a lot of time on it. But, I did begin to pick up something about an injury in a past life before I had to let it go and get on with my day. It wasn't until late in the afternoon that I made time to lay down and dig into it some more. What I found was not a single past life injury, but a whole series of them!
I wasn't able to find everything I needed to find, but what I did find was pretty interesting. In the first life, my pelvis was crushed by a rectangular block, bigger than I was, at some kind of construction site. I can still see the stone, it came down at an angle and pretty much cut me in half. I asked about the lesson of that life, it was Trust. I ended up where I was because I didn't trust the people I was working with.
The next life my pelvis was crushed again, this time under a castle portcullis. Something bad was going on in the castle and I was too afraid to trust the people to keep me safe, so I tried to escape and got caught and crushed going through the gate. Again, Trust was the lesson.
There was also a third life. This time I was killed by a bear in a mountain forest. I had somehow tripped or the bear had knocked me down onto my back and I watched as it clawed out my intestines down to the groin. I had lived all alone up away from everyone because I didn't like or trust anyone. So, Trust again.
I needed to take a break at this point, but I took a little while to look into my current life and, you know what? Trust is a big issue here too. Looks like I still need to work on trusting people, and I'm pretty sure that I know some of the places I need to go out on a limb, be honest, and see if I get acceptance from the people that matter.
Thursday, October 23, 2014
The Structure of Beliefs
Now to the final nitty-gritty of what belief work is all about. First, let me summarize what a beliefs is: A Belief is an emotion combined with a thought and, frequently, physical symptoms. (I haven't mentioned the physical symptom part before because, frankly, I'd forgotten about it. But today an incident reminded me, with a vengeance!) What I have been describing as a "Belief" consists of an originating event and dependent events, which I call activations, which are linked to the originating event.
Originating event are formed when something happens to you that is powerful enough, or frightening enough to scare the primitive parts of your mind into recording everything and filing it in a special place under the heading "Do Not Do This Again." From then on, whenever something in your environment matches the contents of that recording, your primitive mind leaps forward to replay the original event, with whatever feelings and physical discomforts that were recorded. The strength of the replay is correlated to how strongly the current environment matches the recording. This is done to "protect" you, by warning you that a bad thing is going to happen.
Activations, or dependent events, are formed at those times when the environment matches and "activates" an original event recording. Activations also record the environment when they occur, and these new recording are added to the file as triggers for new activations. In this way, mild anxieties can grow over time into debilitating phobias.
The structure of beliefs more often resemble a bush than a chain. I think this is because primitive mind is somewhat over-zealous, and activates recording when the environment is "close enough" to the original. So a recording containing a specific environment can be triggered by a lot of similar environments, and then these are added to the scope of the belief. For example, the belief, "I can't sing," could become liked with, "I can not sing," "I'm not allowed to sing," "I'm not free to sing," and so on.
You really have no choice about any of this. You can't reason with your primitive mind, or bargain or persuade it, these functions are completely automatic and out of your control. However, you can remove the original recordings, which prevents any further activations.
There is one more important point I need to make about beliefs before I discuss removing them: Beliefs take energy. Call it "life force," brain "processor cycles," or whatever you want, but part of your mind's processing power is constantly being used to store, monitor and reactivate these recordings, so there has to be some effect. I don't know exactly how that works, but I do know that when you release a belief, especially a large one, you feel a burst of energy and it feels really good. Over time that high will fade and you will feel like you're "back to normal," but that won't be quite true. You do come down from the initial high, but you don't quite make it back to where you were before. It will seem like it, but that's because it's a "new normal." You've just gotten used to it, so nothing seems different. If you keep on working, one day, something will happened to cause you to notice how differently you react now, compared to the past, and you will be amazed at how far you've come. But still, you just don't feel any different!
To permanently remove a belief from your life, you must remove the original event. This requires that the original event be uncovered, examined in detail and re-experienced to the point where all the emotional charge is released. Once the emotion is completely drained, the event will just vanish, gone, poof. If the event doesn't disappear, and you're sure you've removed everything you can around it, then it's not an original event. There must be another, earlier, event that is holding it place.
An original event can be very powerful and difficult to face on your own. I know this from personal experience. You really need a coach or teacher or guide of some kind to keep you on track. Facing a powerful originating event can be the toughest thing you ever do. It can be physically and emotionally draining to the point where you really want nothing more that to give it all up and run away as fast as you can. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it can be really, really, really, (did I say really?) hard.
One way to both find original events and to make them easier to remove, is to "clear out the brush." What I mean is to drain the emotional charge from as many dependent events as you can find. This will weaken the original event. To find an original event, you start by following the chain backwards from dependent event to dependent event. I call this "following the feeling." Which is where you note whatever feeling a dependent event has and search through your mind for related thoughts or memories or anything that maximizes that feeling. Another thing you can try is to simply ask. Ask your higher self, "Show me the next event in this chain," and accept whatever you get. Once you have it, "revel" in it and experience everything about it until the emotions are gone. Muscle testing should still show something, if it doesn't, there is nothing left and you can skip the next part. Next you can use this prayer finish the job: "Mother, father God, maker of all there is, it is co-manded that the belief ___ (fill in here whatever phases this you're looking at) be removed from all time and space, and all levels of existence, and sent off to the light of God. Do it now. Thank you. It is done. It is done. It is done." Now muscle testing should show nothing when you think or repeat the phrase.
Once you've cleared some originating events, there will be lots and lots of orphan dependent events floating around that no longer have an anchor to hold them in place. You can handle these as they pop up. Don't be discouraged if you think your seeing the same belief over and over again. There can be a lot of dependent beliefs and dependent variations, it will take a while to get them all. Hang in there, the more you clear out the better you feel. Relax, you will get there.
Originating event are formed when something happens to you that is powerful enough, or frightening enough to scare the primitive parts of your mind into recording everything and filing it in a special place under the heading "Do Not Do This Again." From then on, whenever something in your environment matches the contents of that recording, your primitive mind leaps forward to replay the original event, with whatever feelings and physical discomforts that were recorded. The strength of the replay is correlated to how strongly the current environment matches the recording. This is done to "protect" you, by warning you that a bad thing is going to happen.
Activations, or dependent events, are formed at those times when the environment matches and "activates" an original event recording. Activations also record the environment when they occur, and these new recording are added to the file as triggers for new activations. In this way, mild anxieties can grow over time into debilitating phobias.
The structure of beliefs more often resemble a bush than a chain. I think this is because primitive mind is somewhat over-zealous, and activates recording when the environment is "close enough" to the original. So a recording containing a specific environment can be triggered by a lot of similar environments, and then these are added to the scope of the belief. For example, the belief, "I can't sing," could become liked with, "I can not sing," "I'm not allowed to sing," "I'm not free to sing," and so on.
You really have no choice about any of this. You can't reason with your primitive mind, or bargain or persuade it, these functions are completely automatic and out of your control. However, you can remove the original recordings, which prevents any further activations.
There is one more important point I need to make about beliefs before I discuss removing them: Beliefs take energy. Call it "life force," brain "processor cycles," or whatever you want, but part of your mind's processing power is constantly being used to store, monitor and reactivate these recordings, so there has to be some effect. I don't know exactly how that works, but I do know that when you release a belief, especially a large one, you feel a burst of energy and it feels really good. Over time that high will fade and you will feel like you're "back to normal," but that won't be quite true. You do come down from the initial high, but you don't quite make it back to where you were before. It will seem like it, but that's because it's a "new normal." You've just gotten used to it, so nothing seems different. If you keep on working, one day, something will happened to cause you to notice how differently you react now, compared to the past, and you will be amazed at how far you've come. But still, you just don't feel any different!
To permanently remove a belief from your life, you must remove the original event. This requires that the original event be uncovered, examined in detail and re-experienced to the point where all the emotional charge is released. Once the emotion is completely drained, the event will just vanish, gone, poof. If the event doesn't disappear, and you're sure you've removed everything you can around it, then it's not an original event. There must be another, earlier, event that is holding it place.
An original event can be very powerful and difficult to face on your own. I know this from personal experience. You really need a coach or teacher or guide of some kind to keep you on track. Facing a powerful originating event can be the toughest thing you ever do. It can be physically and emotionally draining to the point where you really want nothing more that to give it all up and run away as fast as you can. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it can be really, really, really, (did I say really?) hard.
One way to both find original events and to make them easier to remove, is to "clear out the brush." What I mean is to drain the emotional charge from as many dependent events as you can find. This will weaken the original event. To find an original event, you start by following the chain backwards from dependent event to dependent event. I call this "following the feeling." Which is where you note whatever feeling a dependent event has and search through your mind for related thoughts or memories or anything that maximizes that feeling. Another thing you can try is to simply ask. Ask your higher self, "Show me the next event in this chain," and accept whatever you get. Once you have it, "revel" in it and experience everything about it until the emotions are gone. Muscle testing should still show something, if it doesn't, there is nothing left and you can skip the next part. Next you can use this prayer finish the job: "Mother, father God, maker of all there is, it is co-manded that the belief ___ (fill in here whatever phases this you're looking at) be removed from all time and space, and all levels of existence, and sent off to the light of God. Do it now. Thank you. It is done. It is done. It is done." Now muscle testing should show nothing when you think or repeat the phrase.
Once you've cleared some originating events, there will be lots and lots of orphan dependent events floating around that no longer have an anchor to hold them in place. You can handle these as they pop up. Don't be discouraged if you think your seeing the same belief over and over again. There can be a lot of dependent beliefs and dependent variations, it will take a while to get them all. Hang in there, the more you clear out the better you feel. Relax, you will get there.
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
An End to Back Pain
Today I'm working outside. I want to absorb as much of the nice weather as I can before fall truly sets in. Though, with the drought, it may be another winter where it never really gets cold. <darn!>
After my time with Landmark, I found myself sliding into the world of New Age energy healing, you know, crystals, auras and all that woo-woo stuff that I'd always dismissed. That happened when a counselor that my wife and I were going to turned out to be psychic and a teacher. We ended up taking her classes in something called ThetaHealing, and I later went on to study Reiki, the Akashic Records, and a number of other things.
This counselor introduced me to a "beliefs" in a new way. She had techniques for uncovering and removing them directly, and that was so much faster than anything I had seen before. Though, to be fair, the techniques we used then, just seven years ago, are really clumsy and tedious compared to what I have now. I have been told that this is because of an acceleration of learning due to what Rupert Sheldrake calls "Morphic Resonence," where new learning becomes part of a "Morphic Field," or global collective unconscious and once there, anyone can access that learning to learn faster and go further than their predecessors.
At any rate, we spent a lot time with working uncovering and removing beliefs, which allowed me to be more open to new ways of looking at things. The most spectacular removal happened, of all places, when I was sitting at my kitchen table.
We had been working, on and off, on my back problems. I had lower back pain since my late teens, and I had worked out, early on, that there didn't seem to be any physical limitation involved. I seemed to have all the flexibility and strength in my back that I needed, yet it hurt. Sometimes better, sometime worse, occasionally crippling, and, even at the best of times, it always seemed to be hovering in the background.
We had been working on this for quite some time, but it seemed to be something we just couldn't get at. She released and cleared a lot of stuff, but something just wouldn't budge. It felt to me like a dark mass in my back that would not let go. But then there was an evening when, as I was sitting at the kitchen table with nobody else around, there was this big feeling of whoosh! Where was something whooshing right up and out of my body. It was a very strange feeling. Afterword, I felt much lighter and peaceful, and that "dark mass" was gone. I can definitely say that, since that time, I have not had any back pain. Even that feeling of a shadow pain, hovering, just waiting to come out, is gone.
I have no idea what that "dark mass" was, or where it went, but I do know that the belief work layed the foundation that allowed it to be released. That's what belief work all about, it's not the be all and end all of energy healing, but it is an essential tool that every healer should know. No matter what techniques you use as a student or healer, stumbling blocks related to beliefs will come up and knowing how to recognize them and process them out, makes it easier on both you and your client.
After my time with Landmark, I found myself sliding into the world of New Age energy healing, you know, crystals, auras and all that woo-woo stuff that I'd always dismissed. That happened when a counselor that my wife and I were going to turned out to be psychic and a teacher. We ended up taking her classes in something called ThetaHealing, and I later went on to study Reiki, the Akashic Records, and a number of other things.
This counselor introduced me to a "beliefs" in a new way. She had techniques for uncovering and removing them directly, and that was so much faster than anything I had seen before. Though, to be fair, the techniques we used then, just seven years ago, are really clumsy and tedious compared to what I have now. I have been told that this is because of an acceleration of learning due to what Rupert Sheldrake calls "Morphic Resonence," where new learning becomes part of a "Morphic Field," or global collective unconscious and once there, anyone can access that learning to learn faster and go further than their predecessors.
At any rate, we spent a lot time with working uncovering and removing beliefs, which allowed me to be more open to new ways of looking at things. The most spectacular removal happened, of all places, when I was sitting at my kitchen table.
We had been working, on and off, on my back problems. I had lower back pain since my late teens, and I had worked out, early on, that there didn't seem to be any physical limitation involved. I seemed to have all the flexibility and strength in my back that I needed, yet it hurt. Sometimes better, sometime worse, occasionally crippling, and, even at the best of times, it always seemed to be hovering in the background.
We had been working on this for quite some time, but it seemed to be something we just couldn't get at. She released and cleared a lot of stuff, but something just wouldn't budge. It felt to me like a dark mass in my back that would not let go. But then there was an evening when, as I was sitting at the kitchen table with nobody else around, there was this big feeling of whoosh! Where was something whooshing right up and out of my body. It was a very strange feeling. Afterword, I felt much lighter and peaceful, and that "dark mass" was gone. I can definitely say that, since that time, I have not had any back pain. Even that feeling of a shadow pain, hovering, just waiting to come out, is gone.
I have no idea what that "dark mass" was, or where it went, but I do know that the belief work layed the foundation that allowed it to be released. That's what belief work all about, it's not the be all and end all of energy healing, but it is an essential tool that every healer should know. No matter what techniques you use as a student or healer, stumbling blocks related to beliefs will come up and knowing how to recognize them and process them out, makes it easier on both you and your client.
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Before Dawn
I was going to talk more about beliefs today, but, you know what? I'm going to tell you about a story instead. This came to me a while ago. Maybe I made it up, maybe it's a dream or a memory. Make of it what you will.
This is a short story. As it opens, I am standing at the railing of a sailing ship. This ship is fairly small, for an ocean-going vessel, maybe 20-30 feet long, wood, with a single mast. Think of a phoenician galley, if you want a rough idea what it looked like. This ship is a trader, not a war ship, and we were on our way to a colony among indigenous people. This trip has taken some weeks, but was more than half over. I knew that we were near the mouth of the great river, and, once there, there would be no more sickening rolling waves and salt air for the rest of the journey. The colony is on the banks of the river, many days from the coast.
I am a middle-aged women, accompanied by a single, armed, escort, who was also a friend. I was secretly transporting valuable temple artifacts to our colony for safekeeping. We knew that things at home were going badly and didn't want to risk the temple holies being destroyed or falling into the wrong hands where they would be misused. This is one trip among several, and the most important one yet. The objects I carried were the most valuable I had ever seen, and I was worried that something would happen. The responsibility weighed so heavily on me that I found it difficult to sleep, which is why I was standing by the railing before dawn.
The sea is calm, under a gray, pre-dawn sky. There is no wind. Just a heavy, warm, suffocating humidity that hangs over the water and makes all my clothes sticky with damp. I am dressed in long, light-colored, dress and robe of some thin material, with a head covering. Some jewelry as well, nothing flashy, but well suited for my position as a mid-level temple priestess.
I really didn't want to be here. I was a bureaucrat, much more comfortable with tasks that I could quietly complete each day, than with roaming the seas. Everybody to a schedule, everything in it's place, a nice, orderly life is all I wanted. I sighed quietly as I thought, not for the first time, that I had been chosen, probably, for that very reason. They knew I could be trusted with all the details and would make sure that everything was done exactly as needed, and I would not draw attention to myself. Everyone would just assume that I was about some boring bureaucratic details of such little value that it wouldn't be worth the risk of the wrath of the Gods, or worse, the displeasure of the temple, to bother me. There were, of course, those thieves that didn't know any better, but that was what my escort was for.
I grasp the railing with both hands, staring out over the water and wished the trip be over. I can smell the salt, much more pleasant than the air below, full of mold, rot and unwashed bodies. Everything is so quiet that I can hear the slight creak of leather when my escort shifts his weight. I feel a little sorry that I'm keeping him up, it is his duty to be by my side at all times, after all, but I just can't deal with being in that cabin any more that I absolutely have to. Soon the ship will awake and I will have to retire, discretely, to my cabin.
There ends the scene. For an epilog, consider this: This was her last voyage. The ship later sank in a storm, with all hands, and the priestess died with an overwhelming sense of shame and failure.
This is a short story. As it opens, I am standing at the railing of a sailing ship. This ship is fairly small, for an ocean-going vessel, maybe 20-30 feet long, wood, with a single mast. Think of a phoenician galley, if you want a rough idea what it looked like. This ship is a trader, not a war ship, and we were on our way to a colony among indigenous people. This trip has taken some weeks, but was more than half over. I knew that we were near the mouth of the great river, and, once there, there would be no more sickening rolling waves and salt air for the rest of the journey. The colony is on the banks of the river, many days from the coast.
I am a middle-aged women, accompanied by a single, armed, escort, who was also a friend. I was secretly transporting valuable temple artifacts to our colony for safekeeping. We knew that things at home were going badly and didn't want to risk the temple holies being destroyed or falling into the wrong hands where they would be misused. This is one trip among several, and the most important one yet. The objects I carried were the most valuable I had ever seen, and I was worried that something would happen. The responsibility weighed so heavily on me that I found it difficult to sleep, which is why I was standing by the railing before dawn.
The sea is calm, under a gray, pre-dawn sky. There is no wind. Just a heavy, warm, suffocating humidity that hangs over the water and makes all my clothes sticky with damp. I am dressed in long, light-colored, dress and robe of some thin material, with a head covering. Some jewelry as well, nothing flashy, but well suited for my position as a mid-level temple priestess.
I really didn't want to be here. I was a bureaucrat, much more comfortable with tasks that I could quietly complete each day, than with roaming the seas. Everybody to a schedule, everything in it's place, a nice, orderly life is all I wanted. I sighed quietly as I thought, not for the first time, that I had been chosen, probably, for that very reason. They knew I could be trusted with all the details and would make sure that everything was done exactly as needed, and I would not draw attention to myself. Everyone would just assume that I was about some boring bureaucratic details of such little value that it wouldn't be worth the risk of the wrath of the Gods, or worse, the displeasure of the temple, to bother me. There were, of course, those thieves that didn't know any better, but that was what my escort was for.
I grasp the railing with both hands, staring out over the water and wished the trip be over. I can smell the salt, much more pleasant than the air below, full of mold, rot and unwashed bodies. Everything is so quiet that I can hear the slight creak of leather when my escort shifts his weight. I feel a little sorry that I'm keeping him up, it is his duty to be by my side at all times, after all, but I just can't deal with being in that cabin any more that I absolutely have to. Soon the ship will awake and I will have to retire, discretely, to my cabin.
There ends the scene. For an epilog, consider this: This was her last voyage. The ship later sank in a storm, with all hands, and the priestess died with an overwhelming sense of shame and failure.
Monday, October 20, 2014
History, Engrams and the Materialistic Merry-Go-Round
Today I'm going to cover some history and how my understanding of beliefs evolved. My first encounter with the things that I call "beliefs" was when I read "Dianetics," by L. Ron Hubbard. Yes, I know, Hubbard and Scientology have become somewhat of a national joke, but he had, or acquired, some insights that were fundamentally correct, once you strip them of all the window dressing. What he did with them was rather silly, though understandable, given his upbringing.
His first insight was that there were these things, that he called "engrams," (I call these "beliefs") which contained thoughts and emotions, and controlled a persons life through the recorded emotions. In other words, when something happening today reminded you of something stored in an engram, the emotions of that engram will be replayed, for example, fear or embarrassment. You, not realizing that these feelings were just an echo of some past event, would assume that there was some reason to be afraid or embarrassed, and behave accordingly, even if there was nothing in the present situation to be afraid of, or embarrassed about.
The second insight was that the engrams occur in chains. That once an engram has been created, by some event, it can be reactivated by subsequent, similar, events in a person's life, and that reactivation creates a new engram, energetically linked to the previous one. Engrams that are frequently reactivated can create long chains, each engram using up a little more of your "life energy."
The third, and maybe the most important insight, is that engrams can be removed by draining the emotional content. This last one is huge. It implied that things like phobias and compulsions could be permanently removed by a relatively simple process. Alas, the process turned out to not be so simple and attempts by Hubbard and his staff to "scienceify" it and make it easily replicable, met with limited success, at best. The bugaboo was that intuitive people could make the process work so much better than non-intuitive people, but Hubbard, and Scientology in general, has never been able to wrap their collective heads around that, so their "science" has long since stalled with clunky procedures of limited usefulness. Later incarnations of the same techniques, under the names EST and Landmark Education, have managed to move the ball forward to some extent, but they still don't acknowledge our intuitive nature, which means that their techniques can only go so far.
I don't know if the people running Landmark Education are just materialists who can't see the true complexity of the mind, or if they are just deliberately keeping it out of their teachings in order to appeal to a particular clientele. But either way, I found that while I initially had some great breakthroughs in their courses, I reached the point where there was nothing more I could get out of their techniques. I had questions but they had no answers.
Next: I finally step off the materialist merry-go-round.
His first insight was that there were these things, that he called "engrams," (I call these "beliefs") which contained thoughts and emotions, and controlled a persons life through the recorded emotions. In other words, when something happening today reminded you of something stored in an engram, the emotions of that engram will be replayed, for example, fear or embarrassment. You, not realizing that these feelings were just an echo of some past event, would assume that there was some reason to be afraid or embarrassed, and behave accordingly, even if there was nothing in the present situation to be afraid of, or embarrassed about.
The second insight was that the engrams occur in chains. That once an engram has been created, by some event, it can be reactivated by subsequent, similar, events in a person's life, and that reactivation creates a new engram, energetically linked to the previous one. Engrams that are frequently reactivated can create long chains, each engram using up a little more of your "life energy."
The third, and maybe the most important insight, is that engrams can be removed by draining the emotional content. This last one is huge. It implied that things like phobias and compulsions could be permanently removed by a relatively simple process. Alas, the process turned out to not be so simple and attempts by Hubbard and his staff to "scienceify" it and make it easily replicable, met with limited success, at best. The bugaboo was that intuitive people could make the process work so much better than non-intuitive people, but Hubbard, and Scientology in general, has never been able to wrap their collective heads around that, so their "science" has long since stalled with clunky procedures of limited usefulness. Later incarnations of the same techniques, under the names EST and Landmark Education, have managed to move the ball forward to some extent, but they still don't acknowledge our intuitive nature, which means that their techniques can only go so far.
I don't know if the people running Landmark Education are just materialists who can't see the true complexity of the mind, or if they are just deliberately keeping it out of their teachings in order to appeal to a particular clientele. But either way, I found that while I initially had some great breakthroughs in their courses, I reached the point where there was nothing more I could get out of their techniques. I had questions but they had no answers.
Next: I finally step off the materialist merry-go-round.
Sunday, October 19, 2014
Change is easy! Not!
When I started talking about beliefs, I thought it would be one post, maybe a bit long, but just one post. But the more I write the more I discover how much there is to say on the subject. One reason is that so many of the people I talk to don't get what I'm trying to say.
The first part of this problem is the "wallpaper" nature of our beliefs. Wallpaper is something that you see so often that you stop "seeing" it at all. You only notice it the day it's not there, and then you may not be able to figure out what's different, you just know something's changed. Beliefs are like that. We've been living with them, every day, for so many years, that we accept them as "just the way the world is." So it can take some effort to get yourself to recognize that beliefs aren't some externally imposed force, like gravity, that you can do nothing about and applies equally to everyone. Beliefs are personal, arbitrary, and can very dramatically from one person to the next. Yes, there are a lot of beliefs that are shared among groups and families, but each person has their own individual version, unique to them. It's telling that even among the most restrictive and dogmatic religious groups, there are differences about what the "holy word" really means and how to apply it.
There's a scene in "Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade" where Jones is trying to cross an underground chasm. The task seem impossible until he trusts, takes a step and realizes that something that appeared to be part of the distant chasm wall was actually a bridge, directly in front of him. Sometimes, all it takes is a shift in perspective to show you that what you thought was an impassible barrier, is, in fact, a minor obstacle you can avoid or push out of the way.
That brings me to what you could call, three steps to the life you want: One, recognize that the limitations and obstacles that keep you down are not immutable natural law but are, in fact, mere assumptions that you have made or have been imposed upon you, and can be unmade or rejected whenever you wish. Two, learn to identify the specific thoughts, feelings, beliefs that are blocking you, and three, remove them. Sounds easy? Well, it is, abet a lot of work, but there are a few catches.
The first catch is that step one will probably require a paradigm shift in your thinking, which explains why so few of us figure this out on our own. And maybe that's why the self-help books out there never really confront beliefs head-on. Yes, they talk about "block" and "limitations," but they never address what they are, why their there, or what their function is. The most popular approaches I've seen either want you to "power" through them, in some fashion, or to paper over them with "positive affirmations." I like to compare beliefs in general to background apps on your phone, the more apps you have running, the slower and more unstable your phone becomes. Doing positive affirmations is like running still more "good" apps on your already sluggish phone to speed it up.
The second catch is that it's hard to keep the process going, once you get it started. To see why, lets do a thought experiment. Imagine that one day you realize that the wall between your kitchen and living room wasn't, actually, there. This is a surprise. You're not really sure why, but you just always assumed that there was a wall there and you walked around. You may have noticed that other people seemed to be able to get from one room to the other faster than you could, but you just assumed that they were "better" at that then you were.
Now this is a great revelation to you and you go out and tell all your friends, "Look at this great thing I've discovered," and what do they do? Some will look at you oddly and say, "How could you not know that?" Others will react quite differently, saying things like "What are you talking about? Of course there's a wall there! Everyone has a wall between their kitchen and living room." You won't be able to convince them no matter what you do, and if you persist in your "delusion" you will lose them as friends. Such is what happens when we embark on a new life: we get tremendous social pushback from everyone around us to remain the same, predictable, person we have always been. "Oh you don't want to do that, dear. I mean, what would the neighbors think?" You can pays yous money and takes yous pick of why our society is the way it is, but the fact is that our society would rather you be suicidally miserable than step outside of what seems a rather arbitrary mainstream.
So, once you achieve the paradigm of step one and manage to deal with the social fallout of step two, then, yes, it's simply a matter of identifying and removing the beliefs that are responsible for the blocks, obstacles, procrastination and self-sabotage we deal with every day.
The first part of this problem is the "wallpaper" nature of our beliefs. Wallpaper is something that you see so often that you stop "seeing" it at all. You only notice it the day it's not there, and then you may not be able to figure out what's different, you just know something's changed. Beliefs are like that. We've been living with them, every day, for so many years, that we accept them as "just the way the world is." So it can take some effort to get yourself to recognize that beliefs aren't some externally imposed force, like gravity, that you can do nothing about and applies equally to everyone. Beliefs are personal, arbitrary, and can very dramatically from one person to the next. Yes, there are a lot of beliefs that are shared among groups and families, but each person has their own individual version, unique to them. It's telling that even among the most restrictive and dogmatic religious groups, there are differences about what the "holy word" really means and how to apply it.
There's a scene in "Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade" where Jones is trying to cross an underground chasm. The task seem impossible until he trusts, takes a step and realizes that something that appeared to be part of the distant chasm wall was actually a bridge, directly in front of him. Sometimes, all it takes is a shift in perspective to show you that what you thought was an impassible barrier, is, in fact, a minor obstacle you can avoid or push out of the way.
That brings me to what you could call, three steps to the life you want: One, recognize that the limitations and obstacles that keep you down are not immutable natural law but are, in fact, mere assumptions that you have made or have been imposed upon you, and can be unmade or rejected whenever you wish. Two, learn to identify the specific thoughts, feelings, beliefs that are blocking you, and three, remove them. Sounds easy? Well, it is, abet a lot of work, but there are a few catches.
The first catch is that step one will probably require a paradigm shift in your thinking, which explains why so few of us figure this out on our own. And maybe that's why the self-help books out there never really confront beliefs head-on. Yes, they talk about "block" and "limitations," but they never address what they are, why their there, or what their function is. The most popular approaches I've seen either want you to "power" through them, in some fashion, or to paper over them with "positive affirmations." I like to compare beliefs in general to background apps on your phone, the more apps you have running, the slower and more unstable your phone becomes. Doing positive affirmations is like running still more "good" apps on your already sluggish phone to speed it up.
The second catch is that it's hard to keep the process going, once you get it started. To see why, lets do a thought experiment. Imagine that one day you realize that the wall between your kitchen and living room wasn't, actually, there. This is a surprise. You're not really sure why, but you just always assumed that there was a wall there and you walked around. You may have noticed that other people seemed to be able to get from one room to the other faster than you could, but you just assumed that they were "better" at that then you were.
Now this is a great revelation to you and you go out and tell all your friends, "Look at this great thing I've discovered," and what do they do? Some will look at you oddly and say, "How could you not know that?" Others will react quite differently, saying things like "What are you talking about? Of course there's a wall there! Everyone has a wall between their kitchen and living room." You won't be able to convince them no matter what you do, and if you persist in your "delusion" you will lose them as friends. Such is what happens when we embark on a new life: we get tremendous social pushback from everyone around us to remain the same, predictable, person we have always been. "Oh you don't want to do that, dear. I mean, what would the neighbors think?" You can pays yous money and takes yous pick of why our society is the way it is, but the fact is that our society would rather you be suicidally miserable than step outside of what seems a rather arbitrary mainstream.
So, once you achieve the paradigm of step one and manage to deal with the social fallout of step two, then, yes, it's simply a matter of identifying and removing the beliefs that are responsible for the blocks, obstacles, procrastination and self-sabotage we deal with every day.
Saturday, October 18, 2014
Beliefs and Who You Are
I'm spending a lot of time on beliefs because beliefs are fundamental to any kind of healing. It's well known to doctors that people who won't cooperate, are depressed or have a bad attitude, recover more slowly than people with a positive outlook. The people who believe in the treatments or the doctor do better than those who don't. And what's true for doctors in hospitals is also true for alternative healers, more so, in fact, because of all the negative messages we are constantly bombarded with. If you want to be a healer, you must believe in what you're doing, and, if you want to be healed, you have to accept that a healing can, in fact, take place.
The evolution of my understanding of beliefs was also critical to my personal journey as well. It took many slow, halting, steps to get me from where I was forty years ago to where I am now. And each one required that I step outside my comfort zone and confront ideas that were just a little further from my dogmatic, "hard science," stance. The funny thing is, I was a bit of a sell-out anyway. Steeped in science fiction and fantasy from about the sixth grade, I always wanted there to be more to life than strict materialism allowed.
The real irony here is that science, (small 's', i.e. the scientific method, the systematic process of discovery) has no problem with spirituality, life after death or psychic phenomena. The data is either there or it's not, and where there is no data, the answer is "don't know." It's the institution of Science, (big 'S') and a small, vocal, cadre of "scientists" that have a very strong opinions about what does and does not exist, evidence be dammed. These people truly have as much to do with true scientific debate as Rush Limbaugh has to do with rational political and social discourse, but they command the public discourse on the subject.
For me, things changed one day when I simply realized that the scientific, evidence-baised, debate on the reality of some psychic phenomena was long over, and what was actually going on was a political/philosophical power struggle, with facts on one side and ego, religion and research dollars on the other. I'm sure that in the long run the facts will win out, it's just a matter of how long it takes. Evolution is over 150 years old and is still not accepted by a huge number of people, so I'm not holding my breath on this.
What I just said may seem completely off the subject, but I think that it's an import example of how beliefs not only shape what you know, they also put strict limits on what you can know. For instance, if you know, in your heart of hearts, that energy healing goes against the Bible, no amount of instruction or encouragement will ever teach you that skill, assuming you'd even consent to try. So, if you want to change your life because you're not happy, or you're board, or things just aren't working out the way you thought, or they are, and you have found you really couldn't care less, you have to start thinking about what it is that put you where you are. Your value and beliefs put you where you are. Your values and beliefs determine what risks you take and what opportunities you accept. If want a transformed life, not just more-of-the-same, you must uncover and change the values and beliefs that are the basis of every decision you make, every day of your life.
Here is where things get difficult, because people commonly confuse who they are with what they have. Yes, it's real common to confuse houses, cars, money, honor, prestige or power with self, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I want to take this to a different level. Are you a Jew, Christian or Muslim, or are you someone who has Jewish, Christian or Muslim beliefs? Are you a doctor, engineer or cashier, or are you someone who has a certain education and occupation as a doctor, engineer or cashier? Are you short-tempered, impatient, loving, or generous, or someone who has these habits and behaviors? Are you truly worthless, useless, a loser, bad at math, or no good with money, or do you have those judgments and belief and act, each day, as though they are true?
Step number one to a transformed life: You are not your beliefs. You are not what you think you are. Your religion, your occupation, your educations, even your thoughts and opinions, are not you. They are what that you have, not what you are. This is the greatest stumbling block that keeps people from being happy and living a fulfilled life, and once you really get it, you are truly on your way. You can start small and accept that some of the stuff running through your head is neither true or essential to who you are, and then you are free to start removing it. All too many people are convinced they have to give up who they are to be happy, when the truth is, being happy requires giving up pretending to be what their not, in order to be who they are.
The evolution of my understanding of beliefs was also critical to my personal journey as well. It took many slow, halting, steps to get me from where I was forty years ago to where I am now. And each one required that I step outside my comfort zone and confront ideas that were just a little further from my dogmatic, "hard science," stance. The funny thing is, I was a bit of a sell-out anyway. Steeped in science fiction and fantasy from about the sixth grade, I always wanted there to be more to life than strict materialism allowed.
The real irony here is that science, (small 's', i.e. the scientific method, the systematic process of discovery) has no problem with spirituality, life after death or psychic phenomena. The data is either there or it's not, and where there is no data, the answer is "don't know." It's the institution of Science, (big 'S') and a small, vocal, cadre of "scientists" that have a very strong opinions about what does and does not exist, evidence be dammed. These people truly have as much to do with true scientific debate as Rush Limbaugh has to do with rational political and social discourse, but they command the public discourse on the subject.
For me, things changed one day when I simply realized that the scientific, evidence-baised, debate on the reality of some psychic phenomena was long over, and what was actually going on was a political/philosophical power struggle, with facts on one side and ego, religion and research dollars on the other. I'm sure that in the long run the facts will win out, it's just a matter of how long it takes. Evolution is over 150 years old and is still not accepted by a huge number of people, so I'm not holding my breath on this.
What I just said may seem completely off the subject, but I think that it's an import example of how beliefs not only shape what you know, they also put strict limits on what you can know. For instance, if you know, in your heart of hearts, that energy healing goes against the Bible, no amount of instruction or encouragement will ever teach you that skill, assuming you'd even consent to try. So, if you want to change your life because you're not happy, or you're board, or things just aren't working out the way you thought, or they are, and you have found you really couldn't care less, you have to start thinking about what it is that put you where you are. Your value and beliefs put you where you are. Your values and beliefs determine what risks you take and what opportunities you accept. If want a transformed life, not just more-of-the-same, you must uncover and change the values and beliefs that are the basis of every decision you make, every day of your life.
Here is where things get difficult, because people commonly confuse who they are with what they have. Yes, it's real common to confuse houses, cars, money, honor, prestige or power with self, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I want to take this to a different level. Are you a Jew, Christian or Muslim, or are you someone who has Jewish, Christian or Muslim beliefs? Are you a doctor, engineer or cashier, or are you someone who has a certain education and occupation as a doctor, engineer or cashier? Are you short-tempered, impatient, loving, or generous, or someone who has these habits and behaviors? Are you truly worthless, useless, a loser, bad at math, or no good with money, or do you have those judgments and belief and act, each day, as though they are true?
Step number one to a transformed life: You are not your beliefs. You are not what you think you are. Your religion, your occupation, your educations, even your thoughts and opinions, are not you. They are what that you have, not what you are. This is the greatest stumbling block that keeps people from being happy and living a fulfilled life, and once you really get it, you are truly on your way. You can start small and accept that some of the stuff running through your head is neither true or essential to who you are, and then you are free to start removing it. All too many people are convinced they have to give up who they are to be happy, when the truth is, being happy requires giving up pretending to be what their not, in order to be who they are.
Friday, October 17, 2014
The Origin of Beliefs
I've discussed briefly what beliefs are, but for now, if you'll allow me, I'd like to set the subject of religious faith aside. There are certain aspects of religious faith that will just muddy the waters at this time. This discussion will be easier to understand if we limit the kinds of beliefs I'm talking about to ones like "I'm not good enough" and "I don't deserve it." Most people have some variation of these and wouldn't mind getting rid of them.
Where do these beliefs come from? Well, one explanation is that they are a survival mechanism. Say once upon a time, you were walking through the jungle and you were attacked by a tiger and escaped. You'd like to avoid that kind of close call again, so your brain records everything about the event, the sights, sounds, smells, anything that might help you to recognize a tiger attack. Then, in the future, whenever you are in those circumstances again, your body will automatically turn on the adrenalin making you more nervous and alert, so that you will watch out for that tiger. Even if you weren't paying any conscious attention.
I'm not sure I buy that explanation completely. Sure, it makes sense, in a evolutionary sort of way, but my experience suggests to me that that isn't the main source of the kind of beliefs I'm talking about. I'm not saying that stressed-induced "beliefs" don't exist. Vets with PTSD and my own experience with a milder form of PTSD from a dysfunctional family make it obvious that they do. What I am saying is that the trauma/stress-induced PTSD beliefs, even mild ones, look significantly different from a therapists point of view. And I'm beginning to think that the reason that some people develop PTSD and others do not, despite going through exactly the same circumstances, is because the afflicted had a pre-disposition, in the form of some pre-existing belief that the trauma was able to attache to and thus persist. But, where do these originating beliefs come from? I have no idea. But that doesn't stop you from removing them.
Where do these beliefs come from? Well, one explanation is that they are a survival mechanism. Say once upon a time, you were walking through the jungle and you were attacked by a tiger and escaped. You'd like to avoid that kind of close call again, so your brain records everything about the event, the sights, sounds, smells, anything that might help you to recognize a tiger attack. Then, in the future, whenever you are in those circumstances again, your body will automatically turn on the adrenalin making you more nervous and alert, so that you will watch out for that tiger. Even if you weren't paying any conscious attention.
I'm not sure I buy that explanation completely. Sure, it makes sense, in a evolutionary sort of way, but my experience suggests to me that that isn't the main source of the kind of beliefs I'm talking about. I'm not saying that stressed-induced "beliefs" don't exist. Vets with PTSD and my own experience with a milder form of PTSD from a dysfunctional family make it obvious that they do. What I am saying is that the trauma/stress-induced PTSD beliefs, even mild ones, look significantly different from a therapists point of view. And I'm beginning to think that the reason that some people develop PTSD and others do not, despite going through exactly the same circumstances, is because the afflicted had a pre-disposition, in the form of some pre-existing belief that the trauma was able to attache to and thus persist. But, where do these originating beliefs come from? I have no idea. But that doesn't stop you from removing them.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Beliefs: Dictators to Madison Avenue
I read or heard somewhere that a belief is a thought with an emotion attached. I like that. I have been working with "beliefs" for years but I really didn't have a good definition for what they were. I have taught myself two foreign languages and I noticed that the "belief" is a really fuzzy concept, which ranges from the casual, "I believe the pen is on the table," to the unshakeable "Jesus is my personal Lord and savior." The difference, of course, is the emotion attached to each. People will rarely will have a problem if you don't think there's a pen on that table, but challenge Jesus' divinity and you are bound to encounter some resistance. At first, it seems like a bad idea to have the same word cover such a wide range of significance, from the inconsequential to the fanatic, but, when you think about it, it makes a certain kind of sense. We humans like to hedge our bets, and since, throughout history, people have often lived in situations where belief on the right or wrong thing could be a matter of life or death, it's handy to have our words be a indefinite as possible, just in case we end up on the wrong side of things.
Why does matter? Some years ago I learned a technique of removing "beliefs." I have since discovered more about how belief function and expanded my techniques, but have been somewhat stymied by the fact that I didn't have a good definition of what I was talking about. What were these "things" that I was removing? I had a kind of intuitive understanding of what I was working with, but without any way to express that to other people, it has been difficult to explain what I'm doing.
What I just said may sound strange: Beliefs are not things, right? You either believe or you don't, but faith isn't just something you can just arbitrarily remove, like an appendix, or insert, like a filling in a tooth, right? Well, it turns out that beliefs are much more malleable than most people are comfortable with. Hey, people "convert" and "lose faith" every day, so clearly "faith" is subject to change.
Let me define something here. For my purposes, the concept of "Belief" can be broadly divided into two parts, Conclusion and Faith. A conclusion is usually biased on some kind of evidence and, when the evidence changes, the conclusion changes. Faith, on the other hand, usually defined as "Belief without proof," requires no evidence, and the only thing that keeps it in place is the emotion attached to it. This implies that if you could remove the emotion from beliefs, then faith would revert to conclusions and, without evidence, vanish. This turns out to be true, at least most of the time.
But why would anyone want to remove anyones faith? Wouldn't that just turn people all into materialistic zombies, believing in nothing and having no purpose other to survive at any cost? First, that's not how it works, second faith isn't just limited to lofty, meaning of life, stuff. It's also the basis of resistance to climate change, of religious, ethnic, racial, cultural, sexual, and you-name-it, discrimination, child abuse, wars, dysfunctional families, dysfunctional relationships, dysfunctional people, and, in short, pretty much of all of human misery in the present and throughout history are the result of unquestionable beliefs and the lengths that people will go to preserve those beliefs.
Right now you are probably thinking that I'm talking about religious beliefs, but not so much. While religion has it's part to play, it's, all too often, just used as a vehicle to exploit non-religious cultural and personal beliefs to some cause. Populations have been manipulated, brainwashed, throughout history, by dictators, politicians and advertisers, by playing on the unexamined beliefs that we all acquire throughout our lifetimes.
Everyone of us has hundreds, if not thousands of little unexamined "faiths," or beliefs we accept without evidence or question. Each one, by itself, is no big deal, but when taken all together they rule our lives. Like a death of a thousand cuts or Gulliver being tied down by hundreds of tiny ropes, our strength and free will are imprisoned behind walls of "shoulds" and "should nots." PTSD is an extreme example of how an unshakeable belief can rule your life.
Hundreds self-help books have been written on the subject of getting past the beliefs that sabotage you at every turn. Many use positive affirmations of different kinds to paper over negative beliefs with positive ones. Others want you to discover and confront limiting beliefs, and thus "win" over them. Both have their promoters and both have their problems. Positive affirmations "cure" self-sabatoging beliefs the same way pain pills "cure" a broken leg; they make you feel better but do nothing about the underlying problem. The "confronters" are on the right track, but they don't really understand what they are dealing with, so their long-term success rate is very poor.
Some people have good success with these books. I believe that's because they have an intuitive understanding of how beliefs work, either through their upbringing, or studies, that allow them to use what's in the books more effectively.
Why does matter? Some years ago I learned a technique of removing "beliefs." I have since discovered more about how belief function and expanded my techniques, but have been somewhat stymied by the fact that I didn't have a good definition of what I was talking about. What were these "things" that I was removing? I had a kind of intuitive understanding of what I was working with, but without any way to express that to other people, it has been difficult to explain what I'm doing.
What I just said may sound strange: Beliefs are not things, right? You either believe or you don't, but faith isn't just something you can just arbitrarily remove, like an appendix, or insert, like a filling in a tooth, right? Well, it turns out that beliefs are much more malleable than most people are comfortable with. Hey, people "convert" and "lose faith" every day, so clearly "faith" is subject to change.
Let me define something here. For my purposes, the concept of "Belief" can be broadly divided into two parts, Conclusion and Faith. A conclusion is usually biased on some kind of evidence and, when the evidence changes, the conclusion changes. Faith, on the other hand, usually defined as "Belief without proof," requires no evidence, and the only thing that keeps it in place is the emotion attached to it. This implies that if you could remove the emotion from beliefs, then faith would revert to conclusions and, without evidence, vanish. This turns out to be true, at least most of the time.
But why would anyone want to remove anyones faith? Wouldn't that just turn people all into materialistic zombies, believing in nothing and having no purpose other to survive at any cost? First, that's not how it works, second faith isn't just limited to lofty, meaning of life, stuff. It's also the basis of resistance to climate change, of religious, ethnic, racial, cultural, sexual, and you-name-it, discrimination, child abuse, wars, dysfunctional families, dysfunctional relationships, dysfunctional people, and, in short, pretty much of all of human misery in the present and throughout history are the result of unquestionable beliefs and the lengths that people will go to preserve those beliefs.
Right now you are probably thinking that I'm talking about religious beliefs, but not so much. While religion has it's part to play, it's, all too often, just used as a vehicle to exploit non-religious cultural and personal beliefs to some cause. Populations have been manipulated, brainwashed, throughout history, by dictators, politicians and advertisers, by playing on the unexamined beliefs that we all acquire throughout our lifetimes.
Everyone of us has hundreds, if not thousands of little unexamined "faiths," or beliefs we accept without evidence or question. Each one, by itself, is no big deal, but when taken all together they rule our lives. Like a death of a thousand cuts or Gulliver being tied down by hundreds of tiny ropes, our strength and free will are imprisoned behind walls of "shoulds" and "should nots." PTSD is an extreme example of how an unshakeable belief can rule your life.
Hundreds self-help books have been written on the subject of getting past the beliefs that sabotage you at every turn. Many use positive affirmations of different kinds to paper over negative beliefs with positive ones. Others want you to discover and confront limiting beliefs, and thus "win" over them. Both have their promoters and both have their problems. Positive affirmations "cure" self-sabatoging beliefs the same way pain pills "cure" a broken leg; they make you feel better but do nothing about the underlying problem. The "confronters" are on the right track, but they don't really understand what they are dealing with, so their long-term success rate is very poor.
Some people have good success with these books. I believe that's because they have an intuitive understanding of how beliefs work, either through their upbringing, or studies, that allow them to use what's in the books more effectively.
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
My First Regression
My first regression from many years ago, back before I had heard anything about past life regressions, before I know what it was called, or what it was for. I just thought it as called "hypnosis." I think that, at the time, I was so disconnected that I suppose the information was there but just went completely past me without my noticing it.
In my vision I was a small boy, maybe eight, sitting on a tall stool in a small hut in a forest. It was night and the room was lit only by the light of a fireplace. I was watching an old man with a beard mixing something in glassware in front of the fireplace. Behind me was a beat up, heavy wooden table covered with glassware of all different kinds, like alchemists use. My cloths were plain and simple, what you would expect for a medieval peasant. I don't think I wore any shoes. The old man had some kind of corse robe. I mostly remember the firelight flickering on his face and the glassware on the table. The forest was very dark and the trees very big. That's all there was.
This was in the early days and it wasn't part of the process to ask questions and try and build a life story that could be relevant to me now.
To some extent I think the images are influenced movies and painting on fantasy novels. Remember, this was the mid '70s and there were none of the special effects in movies, TV, or video games that are common today. But, while there is a certain Disney-esque quality to the images that I can't ignore, that doesn't mean the entire thing is fabricated, it's just been "dressed up" a bit to suit who I was at the time and what I could accept.
I had forgotten about this for along time, but it just came back to me in the last day or so. I think it has to do with me being full of wonder at a new world laid out in front of me. It wasn't that long ago that I found the world a confining place. I was boxed in on all sides by a materialist paradigm that left no room for purpose. I was strangling on the meaningless of it all, suffocating on my own, smug, self-righteousness. The day I said "the hell with it!" and gave myself permission to read and see and think of all those things that are not "supposed" to exist, was the day I became free to be that child again. I could once again wonder.
In my vision I was a small boy, maybe eight, sitting on a tall stool in a small hut in a forest. It was night and the room was lit only by the light of a fireplace. I was watching an old man with a beard mixing something in glassware in front of the fireplace. Behind me was a beat up, heavy wooden table covered with glassware of all different kinds, like alchemists use. My cloths were plain and simple, what you would expect for a medieval peasant. I don't think I wore any shoes. The old man had some kind of corse robe. I mostly remember the firelight flickering on his face and the glassware on the table. The forest was very dark and the trees very big. That's all there was.
This was in the early days and it wasn't part of the process to ask questions and try and build a life story that could be relevant to me now.
To some extent I think the images are influenced movies and painting on fantasy novels. Remember, this was the mid '70s and there were none of the special effects in movies, TV, or video games that are common today. But, while there is a certain Disney-esque quality to the images that I can't ignore, that doesn't mean the entire thing is fabricated, it's just been "dressed up" a bit to suit who I was at the time and what I could accept.
I had forgotten about this for along time, but it just came back to me in the last day or so. I think it has to do with me being full of wonder at a new world laid out in front of me. It wasn't that long ago that I found the world a confining place. I was boxed in on all sides by a materialist paradigm that left no room for purpose. I was strangling on the meaningless of it all, suffocating on my own, smug, self-righteousness. The day I said "the hell with it!" and gave myself permission to read and see and think of all those things that are not "supposed" to exist, was the day I became free to be that child again. I could once again wonder.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Watch for Rain
Today I went to the dentist and ran some errands. While I was out, I handed out my cards to the people I talked to; at the dentist and at the stores. When I remembered. Yup, I was a little nervous about doing that, especially at the dentist, but at time point I have to give up the "I don't deserve it," "I don't want to bother people" conversations. I am never going to get where I want to go if I put in my own limitations.
I get three types of reactions when I hand out my card. Some people shove it into their pocket or put it down without giving it more than a glance. Others read it and seem like they want to ask a question, but don't. And then there are those who read it and start asking questions, which usually leads to interesting conversations. Those conversations cause me to think.
The questions people ask make me reconsider how I present myself. They show me how I'm coming across, how people misconstrue things, and I get to try different approaches to get my message across. I also run into certain things that I have trouble talking about. For instance, do I want to sell my service by opening a conversation with "Have you ever wondered about past lives?" Maybe I do, maybe I don't. In fact, considering what I do, I probably should. But I don't want do. I'm still shackled by my cultural taboos that say these things can not exist.
I have plans to put up a web site and do a marketing campaign around my neighborhood, but that brings up concerns that if people really knew what I did, something bad would happen. I don't know what I'm thinking of, but the image of peasants with pitchforks and torches storming the castle, comes to mind. I have relative that rabidly insist that there are no "taboos," but anybody with their head outside their ass knows the cultural pressures that come into play when you profess acceptance of anything outside the spiritual norm. As tough as it is to be gay or transgender, it's almost more socially acceptable to be non-heterosexual than to be Woo Woo.
Well, I definitely have to get past that, and I'm going to get some, probably a lot, of pushback from those who can't stand the idea that anyone they know might think different. I look at it like this: I have no intention of staying inside for the rest of my life because I'm afraid I might get wet. I know that sometimes it's going to rain, so when I do go out I'll check the weather and dress appropriately.
I get three types of reactions when I hand out my card. Some people shove it into their pocket or put it down without giving it more than a glance. Others read it and seem like they want to ask a question, but don't. And then there are those who read it and start asking questions, which usually leads to interesting conversations. Those conversations cause me to think.
The questions people ask make me reconsider how I present myself. They show me how I'm coming across, how people misconstrue things, and I get to try different approaches to get my message across. I also run into certain things that I have trouble talking about. For instance, do I want to sell my service by opening a conversation with "Have you ever wondered about past lives?" Maybe I do, maybe I don't. In fact, considering what I do, I probably should. But I don't want do. I'm still shackled by my cultural taboos that say these things can not exist.
I have plans to put up a web site and do a marketing campaign around my neighborhood, but that brings up concerns that if people really knew what I did, something bad would happen. I don't know what I'm thinking of, but the image of peasants with pitchforks and torches storming the castle, comes to mind. I have relative that rabidly insist that there are no "taboos," but anybody with their head outside their ass knows the cultural pressures that come into play when you profess acceptance of anything outside the spiritual norm. As tough as it is to be gay or transgender, it's almost more socially acceptable to be non-heterosexual than to be Woo Woo.
Well, I definitely have to get past that, and I'm going to get some, probably a lot, of pushback from those who can't stand the idea that anyone they know might think different. I look at it like this: I have no intention of staying inside for the rest of my life because I'm afraid I might get wet. I know that sometimes it's going to rain, so when I do go out I'll check the weather and dress appropriately.
Monday, October 13, 2014
Hopeless to Hopeful
Today was a downer. Not to say I didn't get anything done: I did yard work in the morning, worked on the hatch in my daughters bedroom and spent a few hours on a project for USGS, but I was haunted all day by a feeling I almost can't put a name to. Call it hopelessness.
I spent a lot of time working on this post, and got nowhere because everything I wrote was depressing, downer stuff. I couldn't think of anything else to say. Finally, in late afternoon, I gave up and laid down for my daily meditation, and, of course, there it was! Why don't I talk about that, it's so obvious!
I can see how that I was caught in a kind of reality-warp, where everything was, well, pointless. Trying to look on the good side of anything was a struggle and felt phony, and, at the same time, it didn't seem like I was depressed or anything, I was just "being a realist." It's also interesting that I kept putting off my meditation. Like there is some part of my that knew it would make me feel better and did not want that to happen. That is something I will meditate on soon, for there is definitely something to discover there.
Now to the fun insight that I managed to "forget" all day. I was reading Dolores Cannon's book "Between Death and Life," and I was at the section where she first discovered her first case of what they call "walk ins." I have heard different explanations of what these are and why they happen, but this one is the clearest and makes the most sense to me. Her clients told Dolores that when a spirit feels overwhelmed and just can't handle any more life, it can request a substitute, and a replacement is found to take over for the rest of that humans' life. This is considered infinitely better than suicide.
The cover for the exchange is sometimes a serious illness, where the person is "never quite the same afterwords," but it doesn't have to be. The new soul is "briefed" with all the proper memories to make the transition as smooth as possible for the physical person, and it takes on the obligation of finishing up whatever tasks the first soul leaves unfinished. There's more to it than that, but that's a basic outline.
So what's that got to do with me? I discovered I am one. (Or have one? This brings up a lot of fascinating questions about the nature of conscious that I plan research when I get the chance.) It happened when I was in my early twenties, at a time that I have long noted as a distinct inflection point in my life. One day when I literally woke up one morning and thought, for no apparent reason, both that everything was different, and that my life, up until that point, was a continuous, pointless, slide into oblivion.
No, everything wasn't a bed of roses from then on. After you spend ten years dutifully flushing every opportunity down the toilette, it takes considerable time to clean up the messes you've created and undo all you've done. It was also hard because I didn't understand what was going on. I had no idea what was happening or why or any methods to effectively deal with it. And for this I blame our "Woo Woo" averse culture where everything to do with the mind is either a religious matter or a mental malfunction. Otherwise, there would be a lot more information about these kinds of things and help for when they occur.
Is this particularly significant or important? Not really. Will it affect my life in any way? Probably not. It's just interesting in the way it explains stuff I've seen and opens the door to more questions and explorations. Like when you read about trees and soil conditions and you go, "So That's why leaves turn red in the fall!" It just allows me to understand things a little bit better, which makes life a little more hopeful.
I spent a lot of time working on this post, and got nowhere because everything I wrote was depressing, downer stuff. I couldn't think of anything else to say. Finally, in late afternoon, I gave up and laid down for my daily meditation, and, of course, there it was! Why don't I talk about that, it's so obvious!
I can see how that I was caught in a kind of reality-warp, where everything was, well, pointless. Trying to look on the good side of anything was a struggle and felt phony, and, at the same time, it didn't seem like I was depressed or anything, I was just "being a realist." It's also interesting that I kept putting off my meditation. Like there is some part of my that knew it would make me feel better and did not want that to happen. That is something I will meditate on soon, for there is definitely something to discover there.
Now to the fun insight that I managed to "forget" all day. I was reading Dolores Cannon's book "Between Death and Life," and I was at the section where she first discovered her first case of what they call "walk ins." I have heard different explanations of what these are and why they happen, but this one is the clearest and makes the most sense to me. Her clients told Dolores that when a spirit feels overwhelmed and just can't handle any more life, it can request a substitute, and a replacement is found to take over for the rest of that humans' life. This is considered infinitely better than suicide.
The cover for the exchange is sometimes a serious illness, where the person is "never quite the same afterwords," but it doesn't have to be. The new soul is "briefed" with all the proper memories to make the transition as smooth as possible for the physical person, and it takes on the obligation of finishing up whatever tasks the first soul leaves unfinished. There's more to it than that, but that's a basic outline.
So what's that got to do with me? I discovered I am one. (Or have one? This brings up a lot of fascinating questions about the nature of conscious that I plan research when I get the chance.) It happened when I was in my early twenties, at a time that I have long noted as a distinct inflection point in my life. One day when I literally woke up one morning and thought, for no apparent reason, both that everything was different, and that my life, up until that point, was a continuous, pointless, slide into oblivion.
No, everything wasn't a bed of roses from then on. After you spend ten years dutifully flushing every opportunity down the toilette, it takes considerable time to clean up the messes you've created and undo all you've done. It was also hard because I didn't understand what was going on. I had no idea what was happening or why or any methods to effectively deal with it. And for this I blame our "Woo Woo" averse culture where everything to do with the mind is either a religious matter or a mental malfunction. Otherwise, there would be a lot more information about these kinds of things and help for when they occur.
Is this particularly significant or important? Not really. Will it affect my life in any way? Probably not. It's just interesting in the way it explains stuff I've seen and opens the door to more questions and explorations. Like when you read about trees and soil conditions and you go, "So That's why leaves turn red in the fall!" It just allows me to understand things a little bit better, which makes life a little more hopeful.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
The Creeping Jungle
I had this happen while meditating today. I was in fairly deep, in a state where it seems perfectly reasonable to ask questions and have them answered. So I asked a question, I don't remember what it was, and I was watching the answer appear as spoken words and typed text when a strange thing happened. It's really hard to describe, but I'll try.
There was a muttering like a distant crowd that grew and drowned out the words, meanwhile a black shadow like a wriggling clump of jungle rose up from the bottom of my field of view and blotted out the typed words before the answer was finished. That kicked me out of my deep trance to a lighter one and I could tell then that there was no point in trying again.
I did the logical thing and poked around and discovered some beliefs like "I am not allowed to ask," and "YOU are not allowed!" Which I think is tells me something important, something I need to explore. I really didn't have time to look into it then, but I will. Probably tomorrow.
Friday, October 10, 2014
Peeking Behind the Curtain
The other day I had a miserable night. I was really upset about something that had happened about a week before, and I just couldn't let it go. In my usual fashion, I had woken up at one or two in the morning and starting thinking about the wrong thing, and, boom, the cycle started and then I couldn't calm down. I tried listening to something on YouTube, but I gave up on that after about half a hour because it wasn't doing any good and just seemed really annoying. In desperation, I flipped over to a random clip about Gangaji. I had no idea which one I picked, but as they say, there are no accidents.
I kind of didn't actually listen that clip either, but after about 45 minutes the phrase "What are you lying about?" caught my attention. That derailed my train of thought and I just laid there letting that that idea trickle through my mind. The idea that I was so upset because I was lying to myself about something, was the first clear thought I had had for a couple of hours.
I restarted the clip and started listening and realized that I had heard this one before. To paraphrase, she was saying that whatever happens in your life, tell the truth about it. The real truth. If you don't want to be with somebody, for example, you can make excuses or you can tell the truth about it, "I don't like you." That may be all there is, but maybe not. Can you tell the deeper truth? There are very often deeper truths under the ones we're willing to express. For instance, "I don't like you because you are judgmental." Why? "Because I am judgmental and I hate that about myself." A deeper truth.
Why was I so upset? Good question. I have already spent way too much time on that whole incident, and had uncovered some interesting things. That for decades I had just kept my mouth shut and let then say and do whatever they wanted, too afraid to make waves. I realized that I had been afraid of them, and thought that there was something to be gained by putting up with them to get on their good side. There was lots more, but despite all of it, I still couldn't unwind.
So, deeper truths huh? So I dug and kept on digging. My "tell" in this case was pain/pressure in my sinuses, which seemed to increase when I got closer to something important. I narrowed it down to one person in particular: "I hate you." Okay. "I want to rip you apart limb from limb!" (With pictures!) Wow! I kept digging, "You deserve it!" What? More digging, "You deserve it for what you did to my family!" Bingo! Wait, what? There's more, with lots of feelings, but that's pretty much the core of it. I lived with and let the whole experience wash over me for while, and then, all the tension that had kept me awake drained away, and my mind started wandering. Apparently, all the anger and resentment I had towards this person was from an earlier life where he had killed or caused my family to die. Surprise! Maybe now I can move towards healing.
Remember the sinus pressure that led me to the incident? Well, shortly after the tension drained away my sinuses suddenly dumped their load of phlegm. I almost choked. It's like releasing that anger and resentment also allowed release of the pressure in my head.
Past lives and their experience are not locked away, deep in your subconscious, they're in your present, all the time, coloring your perceptions, influencing your actions, you just don't notice them. Out of sight, but not out of mind. Like the Wizard of Oz, the man, or men behind the curtain are always there, and, sometimes, if you look in just the right way, you can peek behind that curtain and see what's really going on.
I kind of didn't actually listen that clip either, but after about 45 minutes the phrase "What are you lying about?" caught my attention. That derailed my train of thought and I just laid there letting that that idea trickle through my mind. The idea that I was so upset because I was lying to myself about something, was the first clear thought I had had for a couple of hours.
I restarted the clip and started listening and realized that I had heard this one before. To paraphrase, she was saying that whatever happens in your life, tell the truth about it. The real truth. If you don't want to be with somebody, for example, you can make excuses or you can tell the truth about it, "I don't like you." That may be all there is, but maybe not. Can you tell the deeper truth? There are very often deeper truths under the ones we're willing to express. For instance, "I don't like you because you are judgmental." Why? "Because I am judgmental and I hate that about myself." A deeper truth.
Why was I so upset? Good question. I have already spent way too much time on that whole incident, and had uncovered some interesting things. That for decades I had just kept my mouth shut and let then say and do whatever they wanted, too afraid to make waves. I realized that I had been afraid of them, and thought that there was something to be gained by putting up with them to get on their good side. There was lots more, but despite all of it, I still couldn't unwind.
So, deeper truths huh? So I dug and kept on digging. My "tell" in this case was pain/pressure in my sinuses, which seemed to increase when I got closer to something important. I narrowed it down to one person in particular: "I hate you." Okay. "I want to rip you apart limb from limb!" (With pictures!) Wow! I kept digging, "You deserve it!" What? More digging, "You deserve it for what you did to my family!" Bingo! Wait, what? There's more, with lots of feelings, but that's pretty much the core of it. I lived with and let the whole experience wash over me for while, and then, all the tension that had kept me awake drained away, and my mind started wandering. Apparently, all the anger and resentment I had towards this person was from an earlier life where he had killed or caused my family to die. Surprise! Maybe now I can move towards healing.
Remember the sinus pressure that led me to the incident? Well, shortly after the tension drained away my sinuses suddenly dumped their load of phlegm. I almost choked. It's like releasing that anger and resentment also allowed release of the pressure in my head.
Past lives and their experience are not locked away, deep in your subconscious, they're in your present, all the time, coloring your perceptions, influencing your actions, you just don't notice them. Out of sight, but not out of mind. Like the Wizard of Oz, the man, or men behind the curtain are always there, and, sometimes, if you look in just the right way, you can peek behind that curtain and see what's really going on.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Armageddon Outa Here?
Pondering Allen Watts again: (Alan Watts~ Way Past Seeking Stage!) He discusses the differences between eastern and western modes of thinking. He makes the point that east and west are so different on fundamental beliefs that the eastern belief systems don't even fit our definitions of religion. I won't go into all the details now, but I find it interesting how easy it is for westerners to look at eastern practices and just assume they're seeing the basically the same thing, under a different guise, when in actuality the similarities are, at most, superficial.
I am thinking about how we approach medicine and health in general. We love our mechanistic view, where everything is made up of individual bits that can be taken apart, analyzed, swapped out and put back together again with no problem whatsoever. But when you take closer and the illusion starts to fall apart. Everything, from individual cells to whole ecosystems are interdependent systems. Take a part out, or change it, or add something new, and the whole system reacts in often unpredictable ways. We know this, individually, but we don't believe it, culturally. This is obvious by the way we act, from individual choices up to government policy, like we can do whatever we want, "fix" whatever we want, and everything will be just fine. The "boss" mentality that says that whatever the boss says, goes, and the boss can say whatever he likes because he has the "power," and we are the boss.
In medicine that is sad. The body is not like a car. If your car has a bad carburetor, you can put in a new one and the car will be as good as new. But, no matter what anyone says, you can't replace a heart or lung or kidney and have the body be "good as new." The best anyone can hope for is a normal-ish life forever dependent on anti-rejection drugs and the ever-present specter of complications and infections. Better that dying to be sure, but "good as new," hardly.
The problem is that the body is a fully integrated and interdependent system, way past our ability to understand or cope with. We may never be able to seamlessly replace organs, but perhaps there's a different path, one we find when we stop pretending that the body is nothing but a machine.
Most people intuitively know that they are more than a biological machine, but it's still perfectly acceptable in scientific circles to deny that there is anything more to existence than chemical reactions. Even among the enlightened there is much more understanding about what goes on inside the body than in the mind or spirit. Our language says it all, there are thousands of words for parts and processes in the body and regular people use them all the time, but almost nothing for the non-physical aspects of life. Look at what we have, mind, spirit, soul, ego, conscious and subconscious, pretty much cover it, unless you reach out for eastern concepts that include Chi and chakras. We have lots to say about disorders of the mind, but only a rudimentary understanding of what the non-physical is and how and to what degrees it's integrated with and affects the physical. Not too surprising in a community that still can accept the notion that self-awareness doesn't exist at all.
Western cultures and religions both have a very simplistic, and generally dismissive, view of "spirit," which goes a long way in explaining our self-destructive way of dealing with everything we come in contact with. Our economic, political and religious systems are explicitly designed to ruthlessly exploit and ultimately destroy the very things they depend on to survive.
Individuals and groups can and do fight back to try and keep things from going too far, but unless the systems are changed and ridiculous assumptions like "perpetual growth" are replaced with something real and sustainable, they will ultimately lose.
I believe we need to stop pandering to the materialists and ignore their little taboos about subjects that make them uncomfortable and angry. We need to acknowledge what's right in front of us, do the research and follow the data wherever it leads. Let's stop all this stupidity that certain subject are "not acceptable" or research or publish. It is clearly in the best interest of the system, as it is, to keep any proof of the interconnectedness of all life and people strictly off the books, but it will surface. Whether that will be soon or after a few more Armageddons, remains to be seen.
I am thinking about how we approach medicine and health in general. We love our mechanistic view, where everything is made up of individual bits that can be taken apart, analyzed, swapped out and put back together again with no problem whatsoever. But when you take closer and the illusion starts to fall apart. Everything, from individual cells to whole ecosystems are interdependent systems. Take a part out, or change it, or add something new, and the whole system reacts in often unpredictable ways. We know this, individually, but we don't believe it, culturally. This is obvious by the way we act, from individual choices up to government policy, like we can do whatever we want, "fix" whatever we want, and everything will be just fine. The "boss" mentality that says that whatever the boss says, goes, and the boss can say whatever he likes because he has the "power," and we are the boss.
In medicine that is sad. The body is not like a car. If your car has a bad carburetor, you can put in a new one and the car will be as good as new. But, no matter what anyone says, you can't replace a heart or lung or kidney and have the body be "good as new." The best anyone can hope for is a normal-ish life forever dependent on anti-rejection drugs and the ever-present specter of complications and infections. Better that dying to be sure, but "good as new," hardly.
The problem is that the body is a fully integrated and interdependent system, way past our ability to understand or cope with. We may never be able to seamlessly replace organs, but perhaps there's a different path, one we find when we stop pretending that the body is nothing but a machine.
Most people intuitively know that they are more than a biological machine, but it's still perfectly acceptable in scientific circles to deny that there is anything more to existence than chemical reactions. Even among the enlightened there is much more understanding about what goes on inside the body than in the mind or spirit. Our language says it all, there are thousands of words for parts and processes in the body and regular people use them all the time, but almost nothing for the non-physical aspects of life. Look at what we have, mind, spirit, soul, ego, conscious and subconscious, pretty much cover it, unless you reach out for eastern concepts that include Chi and chakras. We have lots to say about disorders of the mind, but only a rudimentary understanding of what the non-physical is and how and to what degrees it's integrated with and affects the physical. Not too surprising in a community that still can accept the notion that self-awareness doesn't exist at all.
Western cultures and religions both have a very simplistic, and generally dismissive, view of "spirit," which goes a long way in explaining our self-destructive way of dealing with everything we come in contact with. Our economic, political and religious systems are explicitly designed to ruthlessly exploit and ultimately destroy the very things they depend on to survive.
Individuals and groups can and do fight back to try and keep things from going too far, but unless the systems are changed and ridiculous assumptions like "perpetual growth" are replaced with something real and sustainable, they will ultimately lose.
I believe we need to stop pandering to the materialists and ignore their little taboos about subjects that make them uncomfortable and angry. We need to acknowledge what's right in front of us, do the research and follow the data wherever it leads. Let's stop all this stupidity that certain subject are "not acceptable" or research or publish. It is clearly in the best interest of the system, as it is, to keep any proof of the interconnectedness of all life and people strictly off the books, but it will surface. Whether that will be soon or after a few more Armageddons, remains to be seen.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
A Quiet Day
It was a quiet day. I did a few hours of software work for a client in the morning and, somehow, the rest of the day disappeared. I am committed to writing in this blog every day, but today seemed really dull, so what do I say?
I slept poorly last night. That seems to be my lot these days, but my cold has made the usual buzzing, ringing and overall noise in my head, all the worse. That sounds worse than it is, I suppose, but my biggest complaint is a persistent feeling that something is going to happen and I need to be ready for it. It's wearying to be "ready" all the time. I've generally been able to relax and put things in perspective during the day, but it creeps back at night and makes it difficult to quiet my mind.
Enough of that. I had a few interesting things happen around my usual afternoon meditation. At first I tried to listen to Allen Watts' lecture "The Art of Meditation", but it kept stopping after a few minutes. After a few tries I got the hint and let it go and meditated without it. Some time later I noticed that my legs and feet were very cold, like they were in cold water. I had a passing thought that the day must have cooled off and a cold breeze was coming through the window, except the window was closed and today was quite warm here. Some time later I noticed my legs were warm and comfy again. What? I have no idea why. Things like that just happen, that's all.
About an hour later I was...kind of back, but still a bit out there, and was able to get the Allen Watts lecture to continue. While I was listening, there occurred two things I want to mention. I'm going to start with the last one because, I don't know, I want to.
I have a very nice amethyst crystal, given to me by a teacher, sitting next to the bed where I meditate. What I like most about it is that, if you hold it up in the sunlight, and turn it just so, you will see a rainbow inside the purple body. Very pretty. So, I was listening to the lecture, my mind drifting, and I had the thought of putting my awareness into that crystal. Sure, why not? So I imagined myself drifting up to the crystal, figuring I would just go right in, but then, Bang! I bounced off the surface and my whole body jerked. "Huh," I thought, and tried again. Same result, but this time the jerk was smaller. I tried a few more times. It took a while, because when I'm in that state, it's really hard to keep focused on any one thing for very long, and I had to keep coming back to it. So, eventually, when I finally got inside I found myself, floating, surrounded by purple and sensing a cloud of occlusions and discontinuities around me. I could still see bits of the chair and room through the sides of the crystal. The feeling was very...odd, so I soon left.
Finally, something that Allen Watts said made me feel sorry for all those people who live in a strictly materialistic world, where nothing exists that you can't measure. These people are like children, living in their own little reality where everything is accounted for and all the exits are sealed. Have compassion and treat them gently, for they are easily upset by exposure to unacceptable ideas.
Yes, I know that is patronizing, but it's the best I can do at this point. It's a good deal better than being angry, or plotting ways to "win" and show them the error of their ways, so I feel I've made progress. But I have a ways to go to find peace.
I slept poorly last night. That seems to be my lot these days, but my cold has made the usual buzzing, ringing and overall noise in my head, all the worse. That sounds worse than it is, I suppose, but my biggest complaint is a persistent feeling that something is going to happen and I need to be ready for it. It's wearying to be "ready" all the time. I've generally been able to relax and put things in perspective during the day, but it creeps back at night and makes it difficult to quiet my mind.
Enough of that. I had a few interesting things happen around my usual afternoon meditation. At first I tried to listen to Allen Watts' lecture "The Art of Meditation", but it kept stopping after a few minutes. After a few tries I got the hint and let it go and meditated without it. Some time later I noticed that my legs and feet were very cold, like they were in cold water. I had a passing thought that the day must have cooled off and a cold breeze was coming through the window, except the window was closed and today was quite warm here. Some time later I noticed my legs were warm and comfy again. What? I have no idea why. Things like that just happen, that's all.
About an hour later I was...kind of back, but still a bit out there, and was able to get the Allen Watts lecture to continue. While I was listening, there occurred two things I want to mention. I'm going to start with the last one because, I don't know, I want to.
I have a very nice amethyst crystal, given to me by a teacher, sitting next to the bed where I meditate. What I like most about it is that, if you hold it up in the sunlight, and turn it just so, you will see a rainbow inside the purple body. Very pretty. So, I was listening to the lecture, my mind drifting, and I had the thought of putting my awareness into that crystal. Sure, why not? So I imagined myself drifting up to the crystal, figuring I would just go right in, but then, Bang! I bounced off the surface and my whole body jerked. "Huh," I thought, and tried again. Same result, but this time the jerk was smaller. I tried a few more times. It took a while, because when I'm in that state, it's really hard to keep focused on any one thing for very long, and I had to keep coming back to it. So, eventually, when I finally got inside I found myself, floating, surrounded by purple and sensing a cloud of occlusions and discontinuities around me. I could still see bits of the chair and room through the sides of the crystal. The feeling was very...odd, so I soon left.
Finally, something that Allen Watts said made me feel sorry for all those people who live in a strictly materialistic world, where nothing exists that you can't measure. These people are like children, living in their own little reality where everything is accounted for and all the exits are sealed. Have compassion and treat them gently, for they are easily upset by exposure to unacceptable ideas.
Yes, I know that is patronizing, but it's the best I can do at this point. It's a good deal better than being angry, or plotting ways to "win" and show them the error of their ways, so I feel I've made progress. But I have a ways to go to find peace.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
A Lucid, Regression Dream
Last night I had a lot of dreams. This one seemed the most important, and the others slipped ways while I was writing this down. It's the most detailed and lengthy dream I can ever remember.
At the beginning, I was viewing or being in someone else's past life regression. It a Russia-like place, winter, during a war. The time frame was around WWII, but the details seem wrong. I was standing in the snow, watching a huge tractor-like vehicle drive away from me, throwing snow from the treads. It was towing a fuel tanker, as big as the tractor, because the people in the tractor were on their own and couldn't expect to find fuel along their way. The day was clear and bright, the air crisp and clean. My feeling was that the person who's regression this was were in the tractor and this was the end of their story.
At the tractor left, I crossed the snow-covered dirt road and walked along, admiring the detail of the vision. Everywhere I looked I saw trees and birds and tiny flowers. The birds were fluttering and fluffing on the branches of bushes, the colors were bright and clean, the sun bright and hopeful. I was absorbing it all, constantly turning around to see more, and saying to myself that I'd never seen a dream so clear and detailed. I was marveling at how I could look anywhere I wanted, and wasn't restricted to some dream script.
Next, time seemed to slip forward, it was now overcast, perhaps dusk that day or a different day altogether. I was roughly in the same place, a few yards further from the road, near a barn. I was watching a bunch of inept solders trying to hang some of their own. I felt that they were German, but the uniforms were wrong. Anyway, they are trying to hang about six of their comrades and having a real hard time of it. They couldn't seem to find decent trees, the branches they use could barely hold the weight. They try strangling them on the ground and were trying to prop up the sagging branches with sticks. The whole process seemed pretty nasty for the victims.
I was able to walk around and watch them. My feelings were about how futile and useless the whole process was and I had a vague hope that, maybe, they would give up and let some of them live. I didn't stay around to watch the end, time slipped forward again.
Now it was spring or summer, in the same place. The war seemed to be over, the barn was now surrounded by busy children. There were a lot of them, of all ages from toddlers to about ten or so, playing on hay bails. They seemed Jewish. It was morning and the day was clear and bright with vivid colors. It occurred to me that I could interact with the children so I asked a blond-haired girl, about five, sitting on a hay bail, where she was. She didn't really know. I then realized that these were uneducated country children, they had no idea of where they were or what the date was. They might know the name of the nearest village, but that wouldn't mean anything to me. So I just hugged and kissed and laughed with them for a short while until time slipped forward again.
Now it seemed a few hours later, on a dirt road not too far from the barn. I was approaching what I took to be an elder, who had is back to me. He was shorter than I, with curly hair. Dressed in a baggy white shirt, with long sleeves, dark vest, unbuttoned, and dark pants. I started to address him, "Sir..." but then another boy approached me from the left, laughing at me. Then the "man" turned around and I realized my mistake. Even though he seemed to have a full "Amish" beard, the "man" was clearly no more that about eight years old! Oops!
Time slipped forward again. Now I was outside the barn again with a bunch of children that I had gathered. My idea was that the only way I would accomplish my purpose was to tell them a story. A story that they would pass on to their children, generation after generation, until I arrived in the future, in what would be my current lifetime, and I could hear the story and know I had been there.
But I was stuck, what would I tell them? Should I tell them "Rodney Whitehouse was here"? (Yes, I knew what my name was, even in the dream) As the dream ended, I realized that I really couldn't think of anything that would matter.
At the beginning, I was viewing or being in someone else's past life regression. It a Russia-like place, winter, during a war. The time frame was around WWII, but the details seem wrong. I was standing in the snow, watching a huge tractor-like vehicle drive away from me, throwing snow from the treads. It was towing a fuel tanker, as big as the tractor, because the people in the tractor were on their own and couldn't expect to find fuel along their way. The day was clear and bright, the air crisp and clean. My feeling was that the person who's regression this was were in the tractor and this was the end of their story.
At the tractor left, I crossed the snow-covered dirt road and walked along, admiring the detail of the vision. Everywhere I looked I saw trees and birds and tiny flowers. The birds were fluttering and fluffing on the branches of bushes, the colors were bright and clean, the sun bright and hopeful. I was absorbing it all, constantly turning around to see more, and saying to myself that I'd never seen a dream so clear and detailed. I was marveling at how I could look anywhere I wanted, and wasn't restricted to some dream script.
Next, time seemed to slip forward, it was now overcast, perhaps dusk that day or a different day altogether. I was roughly in the same place, a few yards further from the road, near a barn. I was watching a bunch of inept solders trying to hang some of their own. I felt that they were German, but the uniforms were wrong. Anyway, they are trying to hang about six of their comrades and having a real hard time of it. They couldn't seem to find decent trees, the branches they use could barely hold the weight. They try strangling them on the ground and were trying to prop up the sagging branches with sticks. The whole process seemed pretty nasty for the victims.
I was able to walk around and watch them. My feelings were about how futile and useless the whole process was and I had a vague hope that, maybe, they would give up and let some of them live. I didn't stay around to watch the end, time slipped forward again.
Now it was spring or summer, in the same place. The war seemed to be over, the barn was now surrounded by busy children. There were a lot of them, of all ages from toddlers to about ten or so, playing on hay bails. They seemed Jewish. It was morning and the day was clear and bright with vivid colors. It occurred to me that I could interact with the children so I asked a blond-haired girl, about five, sitting on a hay bail, where she was. She didn't really know. I then realized that these were uneducated country children, they had no idea of where they were or what the date was. They might know the name of the nearest village, but that wouldn't mean anything to me. So I just hugged and kissed and laughed with them for a short while until time slipped forward again.
Now it seemed a few hours later, on a dirt road not too far from the barn. I was approaching what I took to be an elder, who had is back to me. He was shorter than I, with curly hair. Dressed in a baggy white shirt, with long sleeves, dark vest, unbuttoned, and dark pants. I started to address him, "Sir..." but then another boy approached me from the left, laughing at me. Then the "man" turned around and I realized my mistake. Even though he seemed to have a full "Amish" beard, the "man" was clearly no more that about eight years old! Oops!
Time slipped forward again. Now I was outside the barn again with a bunch of children that I had gathered. My idea was that the only way I would accomplish my purpose was to tell them a story. A story that they would pass on to their children, generation after generation, until I arrived in the future, in what would be my current lifetime, and I could hear the story and know I had been there.
But I was stuck, what would I tell them? Should I tell them "Rodney Whitehouse was here"? (Yes, I knew what my name was, even in the dream) As the dream ended, I realized that I really couldn't think of anything that would matter.
Monday, October 6, 2014
Late Night Obsessions
I woke up about 3 am last night and couldn't get back to sleep. My body was acting like there was something really important I should be doing, Right Now! But I had no idea what it was. The dream I awoke from was about getting people to take responsibility. In the dream, I was in the show Utopia Limited, among the palm trees, trying to get various people to take responsibility for something, with no luck, but it was really important. Even now I feel anxious, on edge about something, but I don't know what.
After a couple of hours, a phrase slowly began to construct itself in my head. Each bit took a lot of struggle, plowing through "stuff" to find the correct word or phrase. The whole process seemed to take hours, with false starts and sidetracks, and times when I just wanted to forget about the whole thing and go to sleep, but it was too important. Finally I got the whole phrase and then, poof, all the struggle urgency disappeared. Go figure. The phrase was: "I need to acknowledge and take responsibility for my anger and hate towards ignorance and stupidity." Ooookaaay.... Yah, I'm not sure I get it either, but it is what it is, so, perhaps it will make sense down the road.
It also occurred to me, in the wee hours of the morning, that I should write about "soul mates" or "twin flames." There is a lot of confusion and distress about this topic and it's really a lot simpler and more common than legend would have it. What I'm talking about is that feeling, when you meet someone for the first time, that you've known them before. It can be a full blown as you know everything about them and you just absolutely click, or just a profound sense of connection that simply won't go away.
Popular culture would have you believe that this is "the one," "the only," your "soul mate" for life, etc., which can cause a lot of problems if the other is the wrong age, sex, race, whatever, or you're already in a committed relationship. Relax, it doesn't necessarily mean that, it's just the recognition, on a subconscious level, that you have been in some kind of relationship with this person in a previous incarnation. It could have been husband/wife or lover, but it's more likely that was mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, grandmother, grandfather or something else. It, in no way, means you must drop everything to be with that person, it could be that that person came here to challenge you, not complete you. So there is absolutely no reason to beat yourself up about having feelings for the "wrong" person. You have complete free will. You will not thwart some "cosmic destiny" if you ignore them or blow them off or stay "just friends." Your are not trapped by "karma," you are free to have whatever relationship with them that feels comfortable, or non at all. Use your best judgment.
I have gone through this. Over the past few years I have been noticing more and more of these connections appear, and had they confused me at first. I didn't know to do, so I just ignored them and put up with the lingering thought in the back of my mind that there was something wrong with me. It was just in the past few months that I put two and two together and realized, <facepalm> "Duh! We've known each other before!" And there's no real need to pick up that relationship again, especially if the other person doesn't get it.
It doesn't really matter what the last relationship was, because the two of you have probably had many. You play all the parts from different perspectives to understand all aspects of the human experience. So, relax. On your journey you will reach a point where these people start showing up. (Well, actually they've been there all along, you just didn't notice.)
After a couple of hours, a phrase slowly began to construct itself in my head. Each bit took a lot of struggle, plowing through "stuff" to find the correct word or phrase. The whole process seemed to take hours, with false starts and sidetracks, and times when I just wanted to forget about the whole thing and go to sleep, but it was too important. Finally I got the whole phrase and then, poof, all the struggle urgency disappeared. Go figure. The phrase was: "I need to acknowledge and take responsibility for my anger and hate towards ignorance and stupidity." Ooookaaay.... Yah, I'm not sure I get it either, but it is what it is, so, perhaps it will make sense down the road.
It also occurred to me, in the wee hours of the morning, that I should write about "soul mates" or "twin flames." There is a lot of confusion and distress about this topic and it's really a lot simpler and more common than legend would have it. What I'm talking about is that feeling, when you meet someone for the first time, that you've known them before. It can be a full blown as you know everything about them and you just absolutely click, or just a profound sense of connection that simply won't go away.
Popular culture would have you believe that this is "the one," "the only," your "soul mate" for life, etc., which can cause a lot of problems if the other is the wrong age, sex, race, whatever, or you're already in a committed relationship. Relax, it doesn't necessarily mean that, it's just the recognition, on a subconscious level, that you have been in some kind of relationship with this person in a previous incarnation. It could have been husband/wife or lover, but it's more likely that was mother, father, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, grandmother, grandfather or something else. It, in no way, means you must drop everything to be with that person, it could be that that person came here to challenge you, not complete you. So there is absolutely no reason to beat yourself up about having feelings for the "wrong" person. You have complete free will. You will not thwart some "cosmic destiny" if you ignore them or blow them off or stay "just friends." Your are not trapped by "karma," you are free to have whatever relationship with them that feels comfortable, or non at all. Use your best judgment.
I have gone through this. Over the past few years I have been noticing more and more of these connections appear, and had they confused me at first. I didn't know to do, so I just ignored them and put up with the lingering thought in the back of my mind that there was something wrong with me. It was just in the past few months that I put two and two together and realized, <facepalm> "Duh! We've known each other before!" And there's no real need to pick up that relationship again, especially if the other person doesn't get it.
It doesn't really matter what the last relationship was, because the two of you have probably had many. You play all the parts from different perspectives to understand all aspects of the human experience. So, relax. On your journey you will reach a point where these people start showing up. (Well, actually they've been there all along, you just didn't notice.)
Saturday, October 4, 2014
A Path You Can't See, Toward a Destination You Can't Understand
At today's MPCS (Mission Peak Chamber Singers) board meeting, the subject of solos briefly came up, and that certain parties felt they weren't getting enough. I reflected that I had almost asked the director to not give me any solos this year. It's just as well, since our director considers singing in a small group a "solo," I don't need to worry about being out there all by myself.
That's especially funny when I look at how much it mattered to me years ago. How much I wanted to be the one that sang that great part, the one out in front and getting the recognition. I never really thought about the pressure and responsibility that comes with it: If the soloist messes up or just isn't top notch, it pulls down the entire performance. I've never done any significant true solos or leads, (I do community theater as well) and probably for good reason. I'm ok with that. That's absolutely not how it used to be, but there you are.
The first time that this clicked for me was last year. I was watching a performance of "The Mikado" by Gilbert and Sullivan, and I noticed that one lead just didn't have the acting chops to be on par with the rest of the cast. And that's when I got it: I don't want to be that guy. I have seen way too many musical performances over the years where there was someone who just wasn't pulling their weight, and I am willing to bet real money that they didn't have a clue. I so don't want to be them.
That makes me address the question of what is the reason that I do what I do. I now acknowledge how often I did stuff solely because I wanted someone to say "That's cool" and I can then say "It's nothing." It never mattered what it was, if it got me recognition, it was good. But the recognition was never worth much, disappeared quickly, and, as the years went by, was harder and harder to get, sending me into depression. Who knows where that would have led if I hadn't stumbled onto a different path.
If you want to be out in front and be the center of attention, that's fine, but it requires a lot of extra time and work, whether it's music, theater, business or politics, and you are taking a lot more responsibility for the final outcome. When I wanted the glory, I never really thought about the responsibility or whether I was truly up to the task of making a better product. I just wanted to be out in front.
I never really liked or related to those people who say "Once I was like such and such, but now I'm so much better." I can't honestly say if I'm any "better" than I was, but I do feel more willing to step back and let someone else take the lead. I'd much rather have the best performance or product, regardless of my part in it. My job is to do what I do well, and let others do what they do well. If that means that I step to the back, so be it.
Many spiritual disciplines seem to imply that the ego is the enemy, that you must get rid of it to be "enlightened," and, obviously, what I have been talking about here is ego. While it may seem that I'm talking about how I conquered my ego, that's not how it appears to me. To me, it shows up as a shift in fundamental values that allow me to let go of approval from others as my measure of self worth. How that happened, I really don't know. The shift happened slowly, over a long period of time, and was totally unplanned. I'm sure that if you told me years ago where I would end up, I simply could not have understood or accepted you were talking about.
So, for me, right now, I will sum up any spiritual growth like this: A journey along a path you can't see, toward a destination you can't understand, with occasional glimpses back to see how far you've come. Welcome to my world
That's especially funny when I look at how much it mattered to me years ago. How much I wanted to be the one that sang that great part, the one out in front and getting the recognition. I never really thought about the pressure and responsibility that comes with it: If the soloist messes up or just isn't top notch, it pulls down the entire performance. I've never done any significant true solos or leads, (I do community theater as well) and probably for good reason. I'm ok with that. That's absolutely not how it used to be, but there you are.
The first time that this clicked for me was last year. I was watching a performance of "The Mikado" by Gilbert and Sullivan, and I noticed that one lead just didn't have the acting chops to be on par with the rest of the cast. And that's when I got it: I don't want to be that guy. I have seen way too many musical performances over the years where there was someone who just wasn't pulling their weight, and I am willing to bet real money that they didn't have a clue. I so don't want to be them.
That makes me address the question of what is the reason that I do what I do. I now acknowledge how often I did stuff solely because I wanted someone to say "That's cool" and I can then say "It's nothing." It never mattered what it was, if it got me recognition, it was good. But the recognition was never worth much, disappeared quickly, and, as the years went by, was harder and harder to get, sending me into depression. Who knows where that would have led if I hadn't stumbled onto a different path.
If you want to be out in front and be the center of attention, that's fine, but it requires a lot of extra time and work, whether it's music, theater, business or politics, and you are taking a lot more responsibility for the final outcome. When I wanted the glory, I never really thought about the responsibility or whether I was truly up to the task of making a better product. I just wanted to be out in front.
I never really liked or related to those people who say "Once I was like such and such, but now I'm so much better." I can't honestly say if I'm any "better" than I was, but I do feel more willing to step back and let someone else take the lead. I'd much rather have the best performance or product, regardless of my part in it. My job is to do what I do well, and let others do what they do well. If that means that I step to the back, so be it.
Many spiritual disciplines seem to imply that the ego is the enemy, that you must get rid of it to be "enlightened," and, obviously, what I have been talking about here is ego. While it may seem that I'm talking about how I conquered my ego, that's not how it appears to me. To me, it shows up as a shift in fundamental values that allow me to let go of approval from others as my measure of self worth. How that happened, I really don't know. The shift happened slowly, over a long period of time, and was totally unplanned. I'm sure that if you told me years ago where I would end up, I simply could not have understood or accepted you were talking about.
So, for me, right now, I will sum up any spiritual growth like this: A journey along a path you can't see, toward a destination you can't understand, with occasional glimpses back to see how far you've come. Welcome to my world
Friday, October 3, 2014
The Right NOT to Heal
Reblog from-Andy Sway
It is easy to assume as a healer that everyone wants healing. We assume that if someone has a physical mental or emotional issue that causes stress, pain and discomfort, that the person would do whatever it takes to relieve the symptoms of distress. Along with these assumptions we see the ‘problem’ as serious and underestimate the disruptive nature of the healing process on all levels of the person’s life–even when the healing is radically successful. And when we have prior positive experiences in facilitating a client’s healing and they resist further healing, we get confused and go into a state of YEARNING that helps nobody.
I used to yearn to help others transform their lives. It was partly because I was born to do just that. It is my passion, my calling, my talent. But before I turned professional it was also just meddling in issues that were none of my business sometimes. Nobody had hired me. Since I hadn’t harnessed my abilities and directed them constructively I just threw them at whoever was in front of me. I regret that now. Yearning made me weaker, like a dis-empowered beggar, but also aggressively intrusive. I could see the areas that needed healing in others but was not trained to help in a systematic way. I believed that positive transformation was a good thing in itself almost regardless of the consequences. I stirred up storms I had little ability to calm, thinking that at least it brought the issue to light and the potential of healing.
Now I have a different orientation.
When people say they have a certain issue I first affirm their right to have that issue forever. Of course, nobody comes to me to keep these issues forever. Quite the opposite. But it is important, in my opinion, to avoid reinforcing the issue through opposing it. You see, when we oppose something we oftentimes strengthen it. That’s why suppressing emotions only causes them to intensify and grow deeper roots.
Also, as a healer it is important not to see negativity of any kind as powerful. It is important to see the illusion while also honoring the damage these illusions can cause. Just because your issue is an illusion doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. Ask any amputee suffering from phantom pains. But when weyearn to heal these things we can oftentimes energize the issues and make them more concrete in our own minds. That’s the opposite of dissolving the issue.
Allowing the issue NOT to heal paradoxically opens up space for resolving/healing the issue. For example, allowing sadness and tears to be expressed opens up space for happiness to emerge.
It is important as a healer to see health, happiness, confidence and vitality as the core reality while allowing the illusions of their opposites to do their dance until a person is genuinely done with the drama those issues contain. Then we can bring the magic and spread it to someone truly ready for it.
Andrew Sway is a Dedicated Practitioner of Dolores Cannon's method of Quantum Healing Hypnosis. He practices in New York City.
Permission to share this article is given as long as it is shared completely with all links and remains unaltered in any way. Copyright 2014 Andrew Sway.
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