Thursday, September 30, 2021
5:25 a.m. A very good session, yesterday. More on willpower, today, or something else?
Set your switches, change your viewpoint.
Okay. I don’t remember when I forgot, yesterday.
Doesn’t matter, so long as you get back onto the horse. That’s true of most things.
Yesterday in our ILC meeting we did a drumming on how we can consciously experience ourselves as both divine and human.
And even discussing the question is an assistance to accomplishing the task.
I promised the group I would watch the recording and write down what each of us got; it was, as has become usual, coherent as a whole, with each person adding a nuance, in effect.
A reasonable description of life.
I get that you prompted me to mention it, and wish to discuss what you gave me.
You have your notes. It provides an easy outline for some commentary. But do listen and transcribe what the others got, it will be useful too.
I made these notes:
- Intend
- Remind self
- Live it – live it “as if” if necessary
- What do you want to be?
- Treat others as human and divine
- Respect yourself as if you were seeing someone else.
So, point by point:
- “Intend.” Again, it is all about choice. Your life in 3D is not “How did I get stuck in this mess?” nor “How do I get out of here?” but “What do I want to create of myself while I am in this opportunity?” The flip side of that is, of course, if you intend nothing, life will come at you chaotically, or rather, seemingly chaotically. What is not provided by conscious content (channeled by will) must necessarily be provided by unconscious content, usually seemingly via the “external” world.
- “Remind yourself.” As we just said, keep getting back on the horse. Nothing is ever learned by starting off already perfect. That is, if you aren’t failing and succeeding, failing and succeeding, you aren’t likely learning anything, but are either coasting (if you are never failing) or are persisting in doing something wrong (if you are never succeeding). Don’t be discouraged that you can’t start off already knowing how to do what you are setting out to learn. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yet often enough, one’s unconscious assumptions lead one to just that predicament. So – remind yourself. Get back on the horse. Righteous persistence –
- “Live it.” After all, if you don’t make a new acquisition part of the rest of your life – if you wall it off – what can it do toward changing who and what you experience yourself to be? You may wish to keep something private; you may wish to keep it privately sacred, so to speak, keeping it as a special part of your life rather than as an everyday part of your being. Nothing wrong with that, per se. Reverence is appropriate for some things, some states of mind, some practices. But that is not the same thing as learning something and then disregarding it, not integrating it with who and what you are. “Live it” in this context means absorb it, become it. Then you may manifest it as you please. And living “as if” is of course merely “fake it until you make”; it is a form of encouraging yourself, only don’t let it slide into lying to yourself (or, of course, to others).
- “What do you want to be?” If you keep in mind that you believe that you are both human and divine, and that you wish to live consciously experiencing yourself as such, and if you live “as if,” if necessary, or you live remembering and forgetting and remembering again, your orienting principle must come from what are in effect standing orders from the captain (you): “We wish to become conscious of ourself as both human and divine, without psychic inflation and without the delusion of insignificance. Conduct yourselves accordingly.” You see? Direct your willpower to holding a course.
- “Treat others as both human and divine.” There are a couple of practical reasons for this, as well as the simple fact that it is a recognition of what is so, whether or not one recognizes it. Treating others with that respect – as traveling gods met on the road, as Thoreau put it – is not only justified by the facts. It also serves to remind you by indirection of your own similarly mingled status.
- Finally, “respect yourself as you do them” merely makes explicit what was implicit in the previous point. If you treat yourself differently, it will reinforce thinking of yourself differently, and both will reinforce actually experiencing yourself differently. After all, the point is not to fake it, but to make it.
Nice exposition, but we have used up about 2/3rds of our hour.
Are you catching a train?
Do you have another subject queued up?
Bear in mind, all this does not explicitly deal with how your doing this connects with the external subjectivity, or what you call “your times.” Yet that is an important thing to be factored into your equation (that is, your life).
Are you saying there are easier and harder times to accomplish this?
That’s a “yes but no” situation. Obviously some situations are more conducive to such practices than are others. The problem is, you don’t know what they are. The birdman of Alcatraz, Stroud, discovered his soul (so to speak) while serving a life sentence, and he is not the only person to do so. Cervantes and Loyola were examples of people whose bodily misfortunes turned out to be considerable good fortunes. Life can use any circumstance, pleasant or unpleasant, safe or dangerous, riotous or quiet. But it is true that a modicum of personal freedom and quiet are more conducive to such realizations. Monasteries and nunneries – Buddhist, no less than Christian – were founded to provide social support for just such conditions.
However, we know what you are asking specifically. Are you in particularly auspicious times for this, or perhaps in particularly inauspicious times for this? But surely you can see that the answer is and always is and has to be: For some it is particularly auspicious, for some particularly inauspicious, for others neither one nor the other extreme. Solzhenitsyn, Koestler, Dostoevsky show what may be achieved in prison. That doesn’t make prison desirable per se. Thoreau, Admiral Byrd, millions of unknown solitaries show what may be achieved in conditions more or less without external constraints. That doesn’t make two years at Walden or months in the Antarctic necessary or even desirable as models to be followed. And it is a good thing for everybody that this is so!
Sure, I can see that. And I suppose that implicit in your answer is that if our circumstances were not right for us, they would change.
How could it happen that they were not right for you?
Sometimes we have to wait for the right circumstances.
And sometimes the conditions of waiting are themselves the right circumstances.
Okay, I see that. That’s one we have to take on faith, rather than on evidence, but I don’t have any problem with that.
And that is a good place to pause.
Today’s?
“Human and divine: How to proceed.” Or whatever you decide.
Our thanks as always.