[I had made this entry early in the day I entered the Medical Intuition course, but had more or less forgotten about it until i looked through my journal this morning.]
Saturday, May 14, 2016
F: 7:10 a.m. So, Miss Rita – I turn to you instinctively – what of this program coming up? I don’t really know why I’m taking it and don’t know what to expect. Nothing new there. But, here it comes.
No, that isn’t what I want to talk about, and maybe Rita isn’t the person. We’ll see. I’m disturbed about who I am and what I feel.
Things move on.
F: Nothing stays the same, but there are continuities.
Among the continuities are relationships changing. Perhaps we should talk about this.
F: Rita after all, then? Not that you aren’t most welcome, but is this necessarily for public consumption?
Remember that it is your choice, hence your choice. Nor do you have to present anything verbatim and unedited. Nor have you ever, only the editing has been tacit and preverbal.
F: Okay.
You live now so close to the bone, so to speak, that your continuity to even the very recent past is tenuous. It Is more than you not remembering, more even than you not thinking to remember. Instead, you associate rather than construct or maintain.
F: I don’t have the idea of it yet.
You know the different ways of thinking. Express them.
F: Logical thought – start from a premise and build from it, checking connections as you go.
Associative thought – you have a thought, it suggests another, you ride the stream of associations like canoeing down a stream, with or without paddling.
There is a combination of the two that might be called intuitive-logical and one that might be called intuitive-associative. The latter would be your paying attention in a certain way to the various items thrown up as you travel downstream, and remaining actively alert for the inspiration they may throw up with them. This is the artist’s way of living, say. The former is more or less the same except it looks for such moments while pursuing a chain of thought logically. It is purposive but open to suggestion.
F: Not so much difference between the two.
No, a matter of emphasis. And as with most things that may be logically delineated and separated, they are being considered separately, but are not necessarily experienced separately. But this is merely to suggest a new way of processing what you experience.
F: Which processing automatically changes it.
That is practically a definition of life, processing what you experience, which in turn alters what you experience, which you then process, and so forth.
So, to bring it back to your present situation. You live and you process. But what you process is usually less what has just happened, more what has been stirred up by what has just happened. So it seems to you (and often rightly enough) that you don’t really live what happens to you.
F: As opposed to?
If one lives in the moment and absorbs what happens, and reflects on it, and makes the lesson of the moment one’s own, it is an intense rich life – but it too has its limitations.
F: That implies that I derive particular advantages from my way of being. They aren’t always obvious.
Your way of being is not for everybody, but no one’s is. In a wilderness of freedom, there are no prescribed paths, only the beaten paths most traveled – which is not the same thing.
F: I think I could use a little reassurance, here. I had to remember, waking up, that one need only trust.
Your strength and weakness are going to tend to be the same thing, of course.
F: “The defect of his qualities.”
That’s where the saying came from, that’s the reality.
You can be as logical as the next one – more so than most, really – on the things you put your attention to. But you aren’t self-reflective for lack of a firm place to stand, and you can’t get that firm place to stand in the absence of
F: Lost it.
Perhaps we should defer this.
F: I am no less stirred up.
Live it, and live with it, and live in it. Lowly faithful, banish fear. [Quoting the Emerson poem “Terminus.”]
F: I know. All right, maybe more later.
This interchange with you and Rita is so useful to me. I am stirred by her statement, “You live so close to the bone now,” about associating rather than remembering. And yours about “the defect of his qualities.” And intuitive-associative and intuitive-logical. And that we process what has been stirred by life. I copied most of this into my journal for later reflection. There are no words to thank you for what you bring.
Your saying that it is helpful is thanks enough. I appreciate it.