All right, let’s proceed. Jane Coleman wonders (and so do I, now that she brings it up), who uses the view from all the windows? That is, if each of us in 3D is a window into 3D reality, who is it who benefits from all that observation? And this amounts to one more angle on the question of what it’s all about.
A question of enough magnitude and importance to intimidate you.
Well, yes. It’s times like this that I’d wish to be an unconscious conduit like Edgar Cayce or Jane Roberts, so that the information could just come forth, without psychological conflicts centering on, “Am I just making this up?” or, just as bad, a locking up of the gears.
Yes, the latter condition being the equivalent of asthma.
I beg your pardon?
Is not one aspect of asthma the inability to leave an unconscious process to the unconscious, as conflict brings it to the surface against your will?
Say that is similar. What follows?
In your momentary state of quiet panic, you wonder how you can manage those processes: That is, how can you bring to consciousness things you have no clue to. Only you don’t seem to have psychic nebulizers or inhalers or pills. You do have an exercise you can do, though, just as physically.
Force myself to exhale, you mean, even while (because) feeling that the need is to inhale? That would be the equivalent. Not quite sure how to apply the analogy.
The analogy amounts to, Express even though instinct tells you to Inhale. Expression will create room for more inspiration which will occur naturally on its own, once you create room for it.
Hmm, a sort of asthmatic corollary to Beginner’s Mind.
You could put it that way. And here is why:
- You know that Beginner’s Mind means, a mind cleared of previous ideas, so that new ideas may enter.
- Your conscious mind (anyone’s) is filled with what you know. It isn’t filled with what you don’t know, obviously.
- Poise, confidence, assurance, all stem from your reliance on the fact that you know what you are doing. Even exploration of new territory may rest upon assurance of past success at exploration.
- At times, one moves beyond the skills one knows. Trauma or a deliberate plunge into deep water (via psychotropic drugs, say, or ecstatic practice of one or another kind) may leave you coping without the use of your accustomed coping skills. This may lead to overwhelm, and overwhelm may lead to a throwing-up of your hands, followed by breakdown or breakthrough.
- Alternatively, a lifelong crisis (alcoholism, say) may lead you to recognize that 3D-you isn’t really capable of functioning without reliance on what is called “a higher power.” This may become a darker, perhaps more traumatic, version of the same journey to a new place.
- Alternatively again, one may freely surrender and live in trust.
In all these cases, you see, 3D-you ceases to drive the bus – and, given that the bus is going 60 mph down the road, with no way to stop it, the question of who is going to steer if 3D-you stops becomes sort of urgent.
Very funny. Yes, it does. You’re making me think of Neal Cassidy of the Merry Pranksters, who had done so much acid and other things, for so long, that he could drive the bus without continually looking at the road — which of course terrified anyone on the bus who wasn’t used to it.
The question of trust always boils down to, “Is there something there to be trusted?” If so, no problem. If not, then trust is foolishness.
Thoreau wrote somewhere that his contemporaries couldn’t understand reliance on providence: It was just dead reckoning to them, he said.
And you grew up with examples closer than that.
Indeed I did. I smile when I think of it, because it is a nice memory of people trusting who didn’t really believe in trusting but were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts.
I forget where and when I heard the story. It had to have been in the 1970s, I suppose, when I was back in my home town after a few years away. Some craftsman was telling about doing some work for the nuns. He was Catholic, so he was doing it out of loyalty, but he was a businessman, so it seemed to him to be an insane way of proceeding. He said the nun in charge had laid out the description of the work they needed done, and he had asked where the money to pay for it was going to come from, and the nun had said, casually (and not in any sense in an affected way, but in a taking-for-granted way), “God will provide.” In telling the story, the guy was at least figuratively shaking his head, but he did the work and he did get paid. It wasn’t his own recklessness or foolishness (or however he thought of it) that he was fixed on, but his incredulity at how the good sisters lived, routinely and successfully. It was beyond him.
As Thoreau said. And examples could be found from anyone’s life, recognized or not. Doesn’t people’s entirely unconscious assurance that their next breath is coming sometimes strike you?
It does.
Don’t you occasionally wonder if your deathbed-moment will be a flowering of your belief that All Is Well, or a reversion to your moment of panic lest your next breath not come?
I do.
Well, that’s the tightrope you walk: Faith or doubt, confidence or concern, automatic reception or grasping for straws.
I thought we were going to discuss who it is who looks through the windows that we are, and why. Instead we have explored this very interesting analogy. If nothing else, a nice way to defer grappling with the question.
You know our methods, Watson: It is always a mixture of process and data.
And part of the data here, as opposed to the process, has been a reminder that paying close attention to the life we actually lead can bring unexpected insights.
Twenty years ago, we could never have led you to compare receptivity to asthma. Ten years ago, we might have been able to bring up the subject, but the analogy would not have struck. Things take as long as they take.
The significance being—?
Trust where you are, no less than who you are.
A little more on that?
You are a window by what you are, what you live, what you decide as a result of what you live. But the window that was Jefferson at age 33 was not the same window as when he was 23 or 43. Your lives have stages, and although you experience yourselves as pools, you are more like rivers. That is to say, you are always a work in progress, and any given moment’s perspective may differ radically from any other moment’s. The more open you can be to the present moment, the closer you can be to your truest, most inmost self.
Which still leaves Jane’s (and my) question unaddressed.
Does it? Stay tuned.
Okay. Well, your thanks as always, and see you next time.