How Deep the Rabbit Hole?

Yesterday I had a massive anxiety attack in a social situation. I’ve had the feeling before, and I’ve been in similar situations before. Sometime they trigger it, sometimes they don’t, but this time it was unusually strong. I knew the situation was coming up, and I also noticed the feeling beginning to rise. I decided to go through with it anyway and put as brave a face on it as I could; no reason to be weird in front of my friends.

Anxiety seems like such a trivial word for such a powerful emotion. It seems like there should be some great and impressive name for the feeling that can sometimes cripple me in certain situations, but, as far as I can tell, there isn’t. There’s just this unnamed emotion that sucks all the enjoyment out some social situation. I hope that some people didn’t feel avoided. I did the best I could, but I when I reached a certain point, I just had to take off or, I don’t know. I really don’t know what would happen if I just let it all out right there. In a way, it’s just a huge feeling of dread and the only solution is to get away.

As I said, I’ve been through this before. In the past I just stuffed it down or ran away, depending on how strong it was that time. This time, I decided to follow my own advice and find and remove the beliefs that, I assume, underlie this emotion. And I was in for a surprise.

I kept the feeling present all the way home. It appears that it was time for this emotion to go, because, unlike most times in the past, it was fairly easy to keep it present until I had time to work on it, and I dawdled quite a while before I got around to it. Today I’m facing my own duplicity in the fact that, although I knew what to do and how to do it, I was still extremely reluctant to face and deal with these emotions. In the back of my mind, I tend to fault others for not dealing with the emotions that are clearly making a mess of their lives, and here I was doing the same thing! Reality Check!

Yes I did get around to processing these emotions, and, fortunately, they were still easy to get present to. So I dived in. It only took a little while to figure out that the core belief I was up against was “I’m worthless.” It seems that all the similar beliefs around it had already been cleared, but I seemed to have missed this one. The processing was fairly textbook, though a bit tedious. One of the drawbacks of working on yourself is the tendency for your mind to wander. The more powerful the emotion, the greater the tendency to “forget” what you’re doing. I had to pull myself back on course more times than I can count. When you’re working with someone, they can help keep you focused.

In a way, it’s a relief to be able to depend on someone else. On the other hand, though, you have to tell them all those secrets that you trouble facing inside your own head. And also, it seems to me that sometimes having to articulate my emotions, and explain what’s going on to a coach, can sometimes get in the way of we’re trying to accomplish. I guess in any aspect of health, you just have to take responsibility for yourself, because you can’t expect that someone will always be there to take care of you.

So, I finally made it to the bottom and there got my surprise. There I was at the bottom, and all the emotional charge was completely flattened, and the belief was still there. That was something I hadn’t seen on a long time! Usually, once the charge is completely gone, the belief disappears without any further effort. Not this time.

When I was first taught to remove or “pull” beliefs, we always to go through a lengthy process for each one, and emotional charge was not addressed. Looking back on it, it seems rather odd, for the charge often got in the way. Now I’m sure that no belief can be released without removing the charge that holds it in place, but, at the time, we simply didn’t consider it. For that past couple of years, I’ve been secretly patting myself on the back because I’d noticed that I didn’t seem to have to “pull” things anymore, all I had to do was clear the emotions and they vanished on their own. I was thinking that was a sign of my advancement!

Ah well. Today the reality I’d been ignoring is pretty clear, and the mechanics of how beliefs work are, once again, present to me. “Beliefs,” whatever they actually are, come in two flavors. One type, a core type, just is, in a manner of speaking. It seems to always accumulate emotional charge, but it’s not dependent on it. It always must be explicitly released, but it won’t actually disappear until all the it’s charge has drained off. In the old days, we would struggle with releasing beliefs, trying various techniques and approaching the process from different angles, until it finally went. At the time, we didn’t get that we were, indirectly, draining off the charge through all our fiddling.

The second type of belief, is dependent on a core belief. It also contains charge, but it needs to be anchored by a related core belief in order to exist. These dependent beliefs are easy to release, you often only have to look at them sidewise and they go. But they will return, if you don’t deal with the core belief that they are related to. Once you release a core belief, all the beliefs dependent on it become “free floating” in a way, and will often release spontaneously, as soon as they are triggered by something in the environment. If not, a few seconds of focused concentration will do the trick.

I hadn’t come across a core belief in a long time. They tend to be well protected and hard to locate. They disguise themselves so well that we accept them, without question, as “just the way it is.” The most difficult skill I’ve had to learn, in the process I’m calling “enlightenment,” is distinguishing the patchwork of beliefs that make up this thing that I call “reality.” I am coming around to understand that the world you experience is a product of your personal beliefs. Even the most hardened materialist accepts that how you perceive the world is effected by how you feel, and how you feel is determined by your beliefs. But how far does this go, how much does perception create your personal reality?

How much of reality is “fundamental” and how much is a construct of your perceptions? I still don’t know; I’ve been digging for years and still haven’t reached the bottom. How deep does this rabbit hole go?

Thoughts on The Seth Material

More thinking about the The Seth Material. I am dwelling on what he said about reality. I have problems with thing like The Secret on philosophical grounds, because I just can’t see how it could work in any reasonable way. I mean, just think of what would happen if everybody could, and did, manipulate reality for their own personal benefit? Wouldn’t the world be a total chaos of competing interests? What would happen when the interests of different people clash, like both wanting the same thing? You can see the problem here.

One possible out here, is to say that you need to be enlightened, to a certain point, before you can make any meaningful impacts on outer reality. That way, you will not be totally greedy and will work with the flow, so to speak, aiming for general benefits. Well, Seth says that’s not so: We all constantly construct our own realities, apparently using some template, but filled in using our conscious and subconscious beliefs as the guide. The trick is that each one of us has our own, personal, reality, which implies that how we experience the world doesn’t necessarily correspond to what others see, and that there is no objective reality out there. He uses the example of three people in a room with a book. In this example, there are three copies of the book, one constructed by each person, none more “real” than any of the others. The books are similar, but never identical. He also says that our personal realities only connect at a few points. I am truly not clear about what that means.

Notice that he said that we construct our personal realities. That everything we see and hear and touch and experience is constructed by us, for us, and no one else can see or perceive any of it. This raises a several questions for me.

My first thought has to do with the psychic and paranormal: Are these perceptions part of our constructed reality, or are they “leaks,” as it were, around the edges of our constructed realities, allowing us glimpses of what is behind the curtain? This is certainly logical and makes a lot of sense, given the context, that, no matter how well we construct our worlds, they will still require a certain about of “buy in” from us in order to be accepted fully. Just like in movies and games, where it requires a willing suspension of disbelief in order to become fully immersed, we have to play along with the rules and not notice the flaws and inconsistencies that might ruin the effect. Paranormal perceptions could be one of those flaws, which might explain some of the enormous interest in, and the incredible resistance to, the subject.

If we all construct our on versions of reality, how do they correspond so closely to each other, especially considering that Seth says they barely connect at all? (Maybe they don’t correspond as closely as we think, how would we tell, after all?) Is there some kind of underlying reality or….something…that connects us all and keeps us in sync with one another? It’s said that we’re all connected through our higher selves. That would provide a mechanism for connection, and the fact that we are generally not aware of this connection allows for information to be exchanged between individuals to co-ordinate their realities on a subconscious level. There is still a lot of speculation here, and I plan to keep reading. I’m most interested in information on just how we manipulate this reality that we’ve created. (Isn’t everyone?) Subject of another post.

The Seth Material

I  reading The Seth Material by Jane Roberts. I'm  a little surprised that it's as readable as it is. I suppose that I assumed that it would be dry and esoteric, but Jane makes it quite pleasant. It actually draws you in. I also thought that it would be a bit dated, and it would just be a rehash (to me, anyway)  of ideas and concepts that I was already familiar with. Turns out that I was wrong.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. The field of, what do you call it, metaphysics? Is sort of an underground movement, largely unrecognized by any of our media, which means that there is much less standardization and cross fertilization of ideas between different groups than might otherwise happen. So, despite the fact that this material has been out there for about 40 years, large chunks of it have not wended their way out into the larger community. 

On the other hand, the field is fairly new, in many ways, and still evolving. You could say that it's only been a relatively few decades since the grip of the Big Three religions has loosened to the point where competing ideas can be openly discussed without significant social, legal or religious backlash, so the field is still a bit of a Wild West with lots of ideas striving for recognition and dominance. There are a lot of contradictory, or at least confusing ideas, battling for recognition and dominance. It's also stumbling a bit while trying to find it's roots in ancient traditions. For some, it really is dominance, rather than consensus, that they're after. I would really prefer that we figure out what's really going on, as best we can, rather than set up yet another religion/belief system, but that's just me. Some people like the mystery and exclusiveness of their beliefs too much to contribute to expanding our understanding of what seems to be a greater reality.

In my own explorations, I have discovered a great similarity behind many different belief systems. It's almost like I can see how the same basic ideas were adopted and then morphed to fit in with the pre-existing beliefs. I suppose that always happens, but, to the outside, it makes it appear that there's a confusing pltethora of competing ideas, when it's really variations on a theme. It's like Christen sects that supposedly believe in the same thing, but can be very passionate about differences that, to outsiders, can very subtle and seem unimportant to the overall message.

It doesn't help that the ideas themselves are difficult to wrap you head around, like, for example, reincarnation. On the surface, this seems such a simple idea: You die and are born again. But very quickly the questions start coming: Why do you come back? What is the point? What determines what kind of life you are going to have? Is it wrong to switch sexes? Does it go on forever? If not, how do you get off the merry-go-round? If there's no judgment, no God, no threat of punishment, what incentive do people have to be good? Why is there evil? Why do we remember past lives, doesn't that mess with the plan? Why do past lives "bleed through" in memories, birth defects, phobias and other health issues? Google "Reincarnation" and you will find a whole lot more questions and discussions, from many points of view, that serve to muddy the water still further.

I don't have answers for all of these, just opinions, but I have always felt that the reason it seems so confusing is that there's a bigger picture we just not seeing. This book has given me a glimpse of that bigger picture. It's also reminded me that I still have many prejudices and basic assumptions that make these concepts very difficult to wrap head around.

In the part I'm reading now, Seth says that we all create our own reality. He specifically states that that doesn't mean we create the universe, just our personal reality. He also makes it clear that he's not talking about subjective experience, but creating physical reality. Exactly how that works, with many people interacting with the same objects, is not clear to me. Seth talks about it, that's one of the parts I can't get head around. Maybe in time it will become clearer.

I have no trouble with the idea that how reality appears and how it actually is, can be very different, but really getting it, is something else. Sort of like the idea that the moon and sun appear to go around us, when it's actually the other way around, I'm trying to come up with some kind of framework I can use put all the pieces into, that makes sense to me. No luck so far. I think I have too many hidden assumptions getting on the way, but, by holding to the possibility that it could make sense, I'm allowing for the kind of breakthrough that could change my life.