Really choosing

Thursday, February 3, 2022

4:10 a.m. It has perhaps been working as I suspected you thought it might. The intellectual response came in the daytime, the emotional response during the night. Perhaps others have had the ame experience. The difficulty is to remember what went through my mind in those hours. I set my switches, and let’s see. (And if I didn’t have that acronym, would I even remember them? I doubt it.) So I am present, gentlemen. Continue.

You will not be wanting to parade your own continuing issues, nor is it necessary. But what is desirable is to illustrate the process and the possibilities.

Yes, I can help you do that. But it involves discussing in conceptual terms things that are essentially emotional.

Not “emotional,” exactly. They may be; they needn’t be. The difficulty you are seeing is that of discussing in conceptual terms things that are real, are felt, are individual units, so to speak, within the general stream of a life. That is, the process of abstraction tends to render any subject bloodless, and thereby inadvertently but inevitably somewhat falsifies it.

You’re right, that’s more of what I meant. Is there a way to get the benefit of analysis without that particular drawback?

The drawback is not exactly the process of analysis; it is the tendency to allow the consideration to be limited to what can be generalized, whereas the important part of it is precisely what is not general but specific. Granted, it is a string of specifics; it is an analysis of what those specifics illustrate when considered together, and when considered in a certain context. Still, it is always true that the process of generalization somewhat falsifies what is being considered.

“All generalizations are false, including this one.” Can’t remember who said it, but it’s true enough.

Still, the process is worthwhile, provided that one remembers its essential Achilles’ heel.

So to work. During the night you found your mind going over recurring patterns in your life. You were remembering an emotional current without partaking of the emotions, one might say.

It reminds me of Bob Monroe. “Remember what you have experienced, but leave the emotion behind.”

There was reason for that, as you see. To re-experience the emotion would be to be stuck in a passed moment. (“Passed,” not “past”; said deliberately.) It is not the same thing as looking at it.

You’d better say some more on that.

It is the difference that we are always harping on. It is one thing to be in the present moment, remembering, even re-experiencing; it is something entirely different to be running tapes, to be passively watching as automatic reactions (robots) play old film. It is the presence in this moment (here, now) that is important. No work can be done, no progress can be made, outside of any present moment. What happened last Tuesday, what may happen next Tuesday, are nothing next to what happens right here, right now, wherever and whenever that present moment is.

Real life is always here, now. It remembers, it foresees, but it does those things from here, now. Anything else is automatism. No work can be done from sleep, as Gurdjieff pointed out.

So, now, holding yourself in the here, now – that is, being fully present – consider what surfaced during the night. In the dream or dreamlike state, undirected by 3D conscious intent at the moment, deeper concerns, more profound understandings and perceptions, may surface. Remembered, they offer the opportunity for you to use your 3D awareness to deal with them, whereas before there was no such opportunity.

I think you just said, our conscious 3D mind, stepping aside, allows unconscious content to come within range, and we can then deal with it, if we choose, whereas we couldn’t beforehand because it was not within our knowledge. That’s basic dream analysis, seems to me.

It is similar in that it requires the 3D will to be idled so that unconscious content may surface, but it is different in one critical respect: This comes at your invitation, rather than having to crash the party.

I see that, but it seems to me that’s a regular feature of dream analysis; you invite the dreams.

The distinction is not what you do with the dreams, but whether or not you consciously invite them.

All right.

So now – preserving your privacy but trying to illustrate the point – during the night certain emotional patterns in your life presented themselves for inspection, you might say. You were aware of them, and not caught in them. This allowed you to realize, upon waking, that here is a subject that would repay your investigation, less “How did this come about” (though that may interest you), than “How did this play out, and to what extent does it continue to play out?” This question before any other, because the goal here is to obtain greater freedom to become the person you wish to become. You are carving out more space for yourself. If you keep that in mind – if you remember that you want all this to be practical – your priorities will be obvious.

1. First, greater knowledge of who you have been, who you are, who you have been striving to be.
2. Second, greater knowledge of any conflicting currents within you. (And there are always going to be conflicting currents, or why would you need to choose?)
3. Third, and this will seem like little when in fact it is everything: knowledge of what you really choose to be. It is one thing to see what you have chosen in the past. But that is a record of past action. Choice here, now, is present-tense. It is entirely different, merely (merely!) because it is now and is therefore real in a way that past actions are not.

That point requires elucidation, I think. I’m not sure I’d get it, outside of our link at the moment.

Give your understanding of it.

I think you mean, any decision is real at the time it is made, and it is always real in the context of that moment. But as time drags us to new moments of here, now, past moments are not alive in the ame way that the present moment is. See, even trying to express it, I’m getting tangled in the words.

We see the difficulty. Every moment exists, but 3D pulls you from one moment of creation to another, and all other moments are dead to you in effect.

Yes, that’s what I was trying to express.

Your freedom is absolute in extent but limited in expression.

Interesting way to put it.

Well, if you can do miracles – and you can – but you can only do them by being present here, now, how else would you express it?

Let us return to our three points of application.

1. Greater knowledge of yourself requires honesty, courage, endurance, and understanding. That is, be easy in your judgments of yourself; it will make it much easier for more profound problems to surface.
2. As you get greater clarity on your own contradictions, you see that these are not failings, they are not things to be condemned or to be embarrassed about or even to resolve to “do better” about. They are conditions that exist, to be addressed calmly and rationally.
3. But you must choose, if anything is to change. Now, maybe you don’t really want to change. Nothing wrong with that, it’s a choice. But knowing that you don’t want to change can bring a greater freedom too. And if you decide that you do want to change, the decision, in the here, now, makes itself.

In saying “makes itself” we don’t mean you can play games behind your own back. We mean, when you really decide, rather than playing tapes that say you “should” decide, or tapes that say you “should have” decided, the job is done and you proceed to live with the results of the decision. That doesn’t mean everything is suddenly peachy. It means, you have changed course by a conscious choice, rather than allowing yourself to be carried half-unwillingly along a course set previously for whatever reasons good or bad.

This was all excellent. Theme?

“Choosing effectively,” perhaps. Or even “Really choosing.”

Okay. Our thanks as always.