Our only hope of control (from “Life More Abundantly”)

Sunday, September 1, 2019

All right, my friends, ready if you are. What can we know that helps us live our lives?

Going to a psychiatrist and carefully concealing anything you think discreditable may save your face, but it doesn’t get you the real assistance that an impartial and helpful point of view would offer.

Hmm. Trying to look better than I am?

Perhaps trying to be better than you are. It can be a fine line, and worth talking about, for life is a long series of decisions about which impulses to encourage and which to yield to and which to fight. In a sense, that could be looked at as a process of trying to be better than you are.

And it’s a good thing, surely.

It is, but it has pitfalls, worth exploring a little. So, here you have been insulted by an old friend. Abstractly you know why; that is, you know what is driving him. But personally, you, as the one on the receiving end, resent the insult. Perfectly natural. You are conflicted as to how to respond within yourself. You won’t lash out in return – at least, you hope you won’t, you resist the impulse, you disapprove in principle. But – internally?

Internally I have logical responses that I would like to deliver, and I have the impulse to never communicate with him again. There is a mixture of emotions fighting it out: anger, hurt feelings, resolution to be better than these impulses – a potful of contending forces. All I know to do is to ride it out without expressing anything negative. But can’t we do harm merely by what we feel, even if less than by what we do?

Some careful thought will show you that sometimes unexpressed anger may be more devastating than expressed, particularly if not under the control of consciousness. You know that healing may be facilitated from one person to another non-corporeally. So may cursing. Your only hope of control is consciousness. Otherwise you radiate energies at a level inaccessible to you, and therefore unmodulated. This is why people ruled by primitive emotions may be effective in the world, while people of mild goodwill are not. But it is also why those who are in control of themselves, who are good by choice, let’s say, have the enhanced ability to do good. Un-conscious goodwill is less effective than unconscious ill will. But conscious good will – focused, intensified, intended good will – far outweighs ill will conscious or unconscious. Life has a bias toward love. Love is like gravity, a force tending to hold the world together. Its opposite is not hatred but fear, that is, concentration upon separation and difference. Given this bias, any conscious work working with the bias is paddling downstream. Working against the bias paddles upstream.

But when we work unconsciously, or consciously choose fear and hatred?

Then you still paddle upstream, but your paddling is more vigorous.

So, paddling in love will be inherently more effective than the same intensity of paddling against it?

Yes, only of course life is never a simple binary choice, always a combination of binaries. All your lives are cross-currents. There wouldn’t be much choosing to be done, otherwise. That said, even one who is being carried downstream under terrific force may still have some ability to steer, even if within severely constricted limits.

 

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