Saturday, September 25, 2021
4 a.m. I must say, it seems to me you guys have both religion and sex on the brain. No matter what we discuss, it seems like sooner or later you revert to talking about one or the other, or both.
It may occur to you, there could be a reason for that. Both are charged subjects, neither is usually thought of in the contexts we include it in, and just possibly we include them for a reason.
Touchy, are we?
No, not touchy, but this is important. If you doubt the relevance of what we connect to a given topic, what does that say about your opinion of us?
Are you worried that we will disrespect you in our minds?
We are concerned lest you persuade yourselves that uncomfortable connections need not be fairly considered, but may be written off as quirks.
Okay, I see that.
“Life more abundantly” implies freedom from unnecessary inhibition. It implies unimpaired mental and emotional mobility. We can help with this by providing concepts that enlighten – but surely you can see that helpful enlightening readjustments cannot be merely conscious. Consciousness is only skin-deep, you might say. It is in the layers of interpretation prior to consciousness that your most effective shaping of reality occurs. But to deal with unconscious or subconscious content is to trigger unexpected reactions. That is the essence of spiritual or shamanic or psychological work, after all: to rejigger your view of the world by showing you how to let go of firmly held illusions so that you may more effectively deal with the world as it really is. And by “the world as it really is,” we mean the interface between your personal consciousness and “the world” which is your area of the shared subjectivity. That interface, we remind you, is the province of feeling and emotion that manifest as thought but are prior to thought.
A model of the world – which includes yourselves, ourselves, everything – is going to be different from the de facto model each of you live by, or what can you learn? If you already know everything, you are wasting your time to inquire. But if you know that there is always more to learn, the question becomes, “What does life place before me at this moment?” That is, what can I be learning by paying attention.
Live with our slide-switches set to maximum focus and receptivity.
There are worse ways to live. Of course, you can intend for these to be set there as their default positions, but in practice you will find it fatiguing. As a practical matter, you will probably prefer to remember that you always have the option of sharpening your attention on demand. Toasting your bread, heating your coffee, cooking your eggs, may not really require maximum focus and receptivity, you see. Thinking you are doing one thing while actually doing something else vitiates the reality of it. So, consciousness. Awareness. Know what you do, and the rest follows.
So let us return to the question of the limitations of trusting the inner voice. Start with your term “Psychic’s Disease.”
I coined that a good long time ago. By it I meant that state of mind that says, “I feel this strongly. Therefore it must be true.” And, writing this, I realize that I manifest this all the time, even though I cloak it in doubt, and I realize that’s one thing wrong with the country today, manifesting politically. People on all sides of all issues are wildly certain of positions they would be hard-pressed to justify by facts rather than by strongly held values combined with unexamined assumptions.
Should it surprise you that you see the shared subjectivity manifesting this, and then you awaken to the fact that your personal subjectivity has been manifesting it regularly?
It doesn’t now that it has! But I wasn’t thinking in those terms.
Anything (a rough rule of thumb you may find useful), anything that draws your attention externally has the potential to surprise you by its internal correlation, if you allow it to. But you have to be willing to go where the associations lead. If you won’t pursue uncomfortable suspicions, you won’t go far in learning what is really at issue for you in whatever is happening.
Understand this, for it is an important point: The “external” world is full of events at any given moment. Each of you has your attention drawn to only a very small subset of that total, obviously. But what you notice is not random. It follow laws of association. If you don’t have Velcro for it – as you often say in another context – it will not come to your attention. But, more, if you notice something, it is because it is potentially revelatory of something quite personal to you.
I get that this means, also, that “life more abundantly” means reducing the number of filters that prevent us from freely apprehending and responding to such correspondences.
Yes. The clearer your consciousness, the more evident are connections between internal and external. It is one thing – a very good thing, but only one thing – to realize intellectually that the shared and personal subjectivity is/are one thing. It is a better, more advanced thing to live this realization, and the only way to do that is to continually allow uncomfortable insights into your own past and present behavior.
Do I hear, “Listen to your conscience”?
Not in the sense of “There’s advantage in feeling guilty about everything.” All that does is lead to numbing and disregard of the nagging voice, in sheer self-defense. Ask Hemingway!
I can inquire closer to home.
So can many people. It isn’t uncommon to have so tender a conscience, paired with so harsh an internal critic, as to essentially paralyze reform. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
You’re about to show us how to reprogram our conscience!
In a way, yes. It’s a matter of freeing it to do its job, and there isn’t any redesign needed. The obstacle arises in the interface.
Very systems-oriented of you.
What you experience as conscience is actually a little different from the design, let’s say. Con-science means “knowing this and that,” you might say. That is, it is “knowing together,” or, relating separate things.
Not sure that is the proper etymology, but okay.
Conscience is designed to say, “You did (said, thought, felt; whatever) this. Your values would say do (say, feel, think) that.” Sometimes it is pointing out contradictions, sometimes confirmations, often grey areas. You see? It isn’t meant to be a standing reproach; it is meant as a compass. Your choices are up to you. But if you have steered 240, you want something that tells you that you’re steering 240 even though the course you intended to steer is 180 or 300.
Until conscience meets resistance to its reports, there is no problem. You don’t experience discomfort or guilt – nor exultation, for that matter. It is information, processed as such. Discomfort comes only when conscience meets an interface designed to protect a pre-selected determination that you are always on course, and of course the wider the deviation being ignored, the greater the discomfort, unless and until disconnection happens, at which time only explosive interjections are able to penetrate the self-defense mechanism. But you are defending against your own compass, designed to keep you aware of what you are actually doing, rather than merely what you imagine you are doing.
Label this “Inner voice and psychic’s disease,” if you wish. We will continue to discuss the external factors limiting your ability to blindly rely upon the inner voice next time, probably.
Thanks for this. Very interesting.