(From Oct. 7 and 8, 2021, slightly edited)
What we are and what we experience
Thursday, October 7, 2021
6:30 a.m. I got a thought in the middle of the night but I was too tired to get up and write it. I trusted that if it was important, you’d nudge me. Ideas stemming from the main idea started to come; it felt like how you follow one thought and then follow the branches. The thought was this: What if it isn’t that we are shaped by what happens to us, but that what happens to us stems from what we are from the very beginning? And yes, setting slide-switches to maximum focus, clarity, receptivity, objectivity.
An unsuspected side-effect, you see. You are starting to think like us not merely in ideas, but in how you come to things.
You all know people who have been entirely unable to get over childhood traumas, or difficulties in later life, that seem to be a case of their having been plopped into an insupportable position for no reason. Some blame it on chance, some on a malign fate (that is, on the universe, or, in another age, on the gods). What all this has in common is a sense of injustice; of outrage cold or hot, and, beneath that, a sense of victimhood, of helplessness. Be it bad health, or abuse, or deprivation, or a hostile or indifferent environment, many people find themselves adults who had to struggle to survive. Often enough, adding to their aggravation, even their already white-hot anger, other people may in a well-meaning way suggest that these circumstances had beneficial side-effects such as strengthened character or whatever. The benefits may well be true, but it is no comfort when someone asks “why?” and the questioning itself is part of the pain.
Let alone when someone suggests that what happened was somehow their own fault.
Exactly. And as you all know, in trying to wake someone out of a sense of victimhood, it is very easy to be perceived as saying just that. Because, “If it didn’t happen unjustly, it must have happened justly – and that means, you’re saying it is my own fault.” The insight we hope to explore may help people resolve some of these difficulties, if we go at it slowly and methodically. Remember, the goal is to live life more abundantly (that is, to be freer of hampering conditions), so as to maximize the gift you bring (which is yourself) to The Other Side when your career enters another stage.
The key insight is that the “external” world is part of you, and you of it. Your life extracts from the world what it needs, what it resonates to, what it has velcro for. If you once really grasp that, you grasp the impossibility of injustice in the world, regardless of appearances.
Impossibility of injustice doesn’t mean impossibility of pain, of course.
Of course it does not. But having a tooth extracted by a dentist, or having a tooth knocked out in a brawl, may both produce more or less the same physical pain, but the meaning of the pain is entirely different. If you live in faith that your pain is not caused by chance, nor by the malice of fate, that helps. If you realize that it was not your fault either before or during this life, that helps too. Then if you can get to where you see that the physical perpetrators themselves were less evil than careless, or were less cause than agent, you are very close to resolving something. And it is that resolution we hope to help facilitate.
- All the world is mind-stuff. No matter how solid it seems, mind-stuff, as of course are you.
- There is no “other” except in your perception. If you cannot believe this, you cannot follow the argument even tentatively. But belief, as we said, is doubt. That is, you believe/doubt until you know. Believe, at least tentatively, if you can: There is no “other.”
- There is no disconnect between you as an individual and the shared subjectivity, because there can’t Appearance is one thing, reality is another. You – we – are all part of the same everything.
- “You” didn’t even exist as you, until you were placed into life. You are the product of the combination of many strands mentally and, call it, spiritually, in the same way that you are the product of the combination of many strands of genetic materials.
- The conditions that existed at your birth reflect what you were, or you could not have been born then. You could argue that some compromises have to be made. Still, it remains: You exactly fit your time and place, no matter how little it feels like it, because there is no other way you could have been born.
- Now, along with what you want to do in life, are all the things you have to True in ordinary life, true metaphysically no less. Any given X may be painful or inconvenient, and may or may not bring beneficial side-effects, but it is there because part of you responds to it. If no part of you responds to a stimulus, you won’t even notice it is there, perhaps. At any rate, you will not experience it as a problem. It will be a non-issue.
- By definition, all the things you experience are relevant to your life. But “relevant” is not the same as “obviously relevant.” Many things in your life are a mystery. It shouldn’t be a surprise that pain and the cause of pain should be, as well, sometimes.
- However, and here we come to the nub of it, any given problem, petty or severe, temporary or chronic, has no power to elicit more than a first-tier reaction. It is your second-tier reaction, and your third-tier reaction, ultimately, that determine the effect on you of any given stimulus, pleasant or unpleasant.
- And finally, the question is not, “What happened to you?” It is always, “What are you doing about it?” Are you going to wallow in self-pity? Reinforce your sense of helplessness? Tough it out, ignoring the pain? “Offer it up,” as the good sisters used to advise? Analyze it to death? Channel your sense of injustice toward society as a whole? These are all common responses, and understandable. But do they help anybody do anything more than endure?
- You may forgive, and this is a good first step. But when you see deeply enough, you see that there is nothing to forgive. When you get that far, you have reason to congratulate yourself, if only provisionally.
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Practical advice on how to live in greater joy
Friday, October 8, 2021
5:55 a.m. I thought we might look at what I got during our drumming session on Wednesday.
“What is our path to greatest joy?”
Openness, because openness is the opposite of shrinking from life. Joy is the path. Follow your bliss and it increases. First, do no harm. A clear conscience leads to happiness. Again, no need for shrinking (from memories). Live in great confidence.
In other words, openness, which includes openness to joy, innocence as best you can achieve it, and faith. Not so complicated a formula.
Some might say, “Yes, but how do we attain it?”
You don’t attain a formula, you live it. And let’s say, as an aside, that “try” and “intend” may sound like the same thing, but they are not. When you intend, that is following a course, watching your compass to be sure you are going where you want to go. When you try, that is saying you are not succeeding, with the implication not only that you have not yet succeeded, but also that you cannot yet succeed. “Try” is an implicit declaration of inability, you see.
So as a practical matter, how do we assure that we are following a course (however discouraged we may be at any given moment) and not silently saying “But I can’t do this, at least not yet.”
You set your teeth, with or without dramatics, according to taste, and you follow your compass. That’s what intend is, it is being pulled by your chosen future, you could say. It isn’t difficult conceptually; there are no techniques to learn (though each person may find it worthwhile to invent or adopt specific rituals to serve as encouragement and reminder). It is really a setting one person in charge, rather than allowing various people to take the helm depending upon any little change in the weather. You all want to crystallize a permanent being. Take this as a practical exercise. Teach your crew to follow one captain, rather than rotating the conn. And there’s no use saying, “I am the captain.” You are more like the shipowner, selecting and then maintaining the captain. (And if you will not do it, who will?) Choose who you want to be captain; that is another way of saying, Choose who and what you want to be, want to express.
So let’s look briefly at what you got when you asked “What is our path to greatest joy?”
- “Openness, because openness if the opposite of shrinking from life.” You should understand this very well. Older people often say the sins they most regret are the ones they didn’t commit. Or, more neutrally, what they regret is far more often the things they didn’t do, not the things they did do. Why is this, do you suppose?
It seems clear enough. The reason we don’t do something we want to do often boils down to fear of some sort. Yes, there may be other constraints, but often enough, we’re afraid, like Mr. Prufrock.
And the two forces in life?
Yes, that’s my point. Love, which is expansion and inclusion – and fear, which is constriction and exclusion. And I don’t know how we can be expanding if we are contracting.
Ergo, a default position of openness is a default position of willingness to love what comes. That may not be obvious, and in some moods may seem to be impossible, but it is true. Now, “to love what comes” does not necessarily mean to greet it with cries of joy, like George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life”: (“Yes, I’m going to jail, isn’t it wonderful?”) But it does mean, “This comes next, let’s see what it brings.” You are going to the hospital, to the unemployment office, to jail, to bankruptcy court, whatever. Scarcely grounds for rejoicing, but it will be a new experience, and you could choose a relatively calm curiosity about it, a trusting that nothing happens by chance. And there’s no use saying of this advice, “That’s easy for you to say.” Whether it’s easy to say is not the question. The question is, are we right? If it’s good advice, it doesn’t have to be hard to say.
As Sam Spade said, “What do you want me to do, learn to stutter?”
Exactly. Easy or not to say, practice is what is important.
- “Follow your bliss, and joy increases.” Surely this is self-evident? Should you expect that the way to increase your joy is in seeking out the things you don’t want to do? It is true that everyone’s life includes things they would just as soon skip, but if you follow where your feelings lead you, it will work out, and probably better than you hope. Just as advocating openness says, “Avoid shrinking from life,” so “Follow your bliss” says, “Not only don’t shrink from it, embrace it, trust it.”
Again, I don’t know why this wouldn’t be transparently evident.
You are forgetting your past in which you did not pursue what would be “too good to be true,” and you are not recognizing the present in which you are still doing it.
Ouch.
Still, you’re right: It ought to be evident. However, like most things in life, it won’t do itself. It can be hard enough to find your bliss, if you look with the wrong tools. (Hint: You want to be paying attention to feelings, not to logic and especially not to “practicalities.”) But once you find it, you still need to follow it, and that often requires a decision of some sort.
- “First, do no harm.” You can’t live without doing harm; that is an impossible ideal. But you can intend to do no harm. You can make your life about not doing harm. You can, in short, do as little harm as possible, and certainly you can live by refusing to do harm either consciously or, to the extent possible, by inadvertence. It isn’t complicated, it is merely a matter of having your captain include it in the standing orders.
- “Live in great confidence.” We should scarcely need to add anything to this point. Everything we have been telling you, all these years, is to this effect. What Jane Roberts brought through, and Cayce, same message. It is a safe universe, it was made for you (in effect).