Thursday, December 29, 2022
5 a.m. I don’t know where to begin, so I will copy the two quotes from Emerson that I copied on the 13th and 14th of the month.
From “Aristocracy”: The great Indian sages had a lesson for the Brahmin, which every day returns to mind, “All that depends on another gives pain; all that depends on himself gives pleasure; in these few words is the definition of pleasure and pain.
From “Perpetual Forces”: The power of a man increases steadily by continuance in one direction. He becomes acquainted with the resistances, and with his own tools; increases his skill and strength and learns the favorable moments and favorable accidents. He is his own apprentice, and more time gives a great addition of power, just as a falling body acquires momentum with every foot of the fall. How we prize a good continuer!
Then I guess my question will be, how do we continue, day in and day out, when our varying moods paint the world so differently at different times? Some days seem bright with promise. Others seems self-evidently a waste of time and space. We may know one way, but we feel another way. It makes it hard to continue.
Maybe continue from when I broke off on Christmas morning? I said I was tired of living, you quoted “Be strong and of good courage,” and I knew how to finish the quotation, and said you don’t see me contemplating suicide, and you said, “No, but merely face each day with active curiosity.” But I was too stirred up to continue, and then I was off to my daughter’s and three days among others.
So – ?
You “just so happened” to find two quotations in your reading that are entirely on point. That fact alone ought to show you that your smallest action is performed in connection with subterranean – or should we say super-terranean – parts of your own mind, and this responds to your question, not quite phrased here (though earlier), of how one continues to do shadow work all the time, as indicated in the drumming last Wednesday. You might as well quote it in its entirety. It’s worth repeating for the studio audience.
The drumming: “What shadow stuff is most important for me to bring to consciousness?”
Depending upon your ongoing choices, different opportunities arise. So, a better question might be, how an I remember to do the shadow work on a continuing basis all year long. Not a grim prospect, more a continuing resolution – a habit. This living alert to possibilities will automatically deal with shadow aspects as possibilities arise.
You see? You don’t need to be able to map the road ahead. You don’t need, really, to have a goal or a desired result (which is not the same thing as saying you don’t need to choose, and to embody your values). Life itself brings you what you need: challenges, requisite resources, temptations, everything. The only thing to remember, if you can, is that No Work Can Be Done In Sleep. In other words, keep waking yourself up, and persevere. This is what is meant by “Work out your salvation with diligence.”
And of course it is the reason why there is never anything to fear, including the fear of meaninglessness, of futility, of emptiness.
All fears are absolutely meaningless, but relatively real. The trick is to take a fear seriously, as indicating something to consider and understand, but to take it seriously only as “somewhat real,” like the rest of 3D life, unable to really affect you without your concurrence and permission and – one might say – your complicity. Everyone’s life has 3D problems, for mental or emotional problems are themselves 3D in nature, remember. (Just because they are not material does not mean they are not 3D in nature. It is the very nature of emotion – as the laminal layer between your known and unknown self, between “you” and “the world,” or between “you” and “the Self” – that it is focused in 3D conditions of compressed awareness.)
Thus, deal with my emotions as they arise, but treat them with a certain skepticism, say.
A certain detachment, say. They are real enough; they have their rights, you might say. Certainly they have treasure they are guarding. But like your entire 3D existence, they are only somewhat real, as we keep saying. All human pain is exacerbated by confusing what is somewhat real for something that would be absolutely real.
And this is enough for today. The quotations will lengthen this, and you don’t want to overwhelm people.
Our thanks as always, then. Mine particularly.