Monday, May 20, 2024
4:50 a.m. I am beginning to queue up questions against the day you say you are out of ideas. Hopefully no time soon. We’ve gotten nearly 30,000 words so far, in 23 sessions.
Always remember that your bright ideas – in this, in anything – are not necessarily yours as opposed to ours together. We do not encourage you or anyone to distrust your impulses, thinking “That’s only me; it can’t be important.”
Well, as you know, I thought yesterday that sometime I might ask you how to distinguish between things we are being prompted to follow up on, and mere stray impulses, or misguided or even maliciously planted ones. I have always had a problem with this, from my very earliest days.
One’s attitude toward this will reflect one’s attitude toward life in general. Where does someone place faith v. doubt, love v. fear, confidence v. perplexity? In one sense, this is the same question posed in three manifestations.
I suppose that means, it is always a decision: toward further integration, or away from it.
Confidence v. shrinking back, yes. Put this in the proper context, and you will see that it is a question of what kind of future you wish to choose for yourself. Not, “are able to choose,” but “wish to choose,” because aspiration is by nature beyond one’s current perceived limitations.
That’s Thoreau again: Envision a fuller life and the world will seem to change in your favor.
Do you suppose there could have been a reason you were instantly captivated by him as soon as you picked up his book? But this same message has been delivered in millions of ways, millions of times, and this is one more repetition. Life can be seen as a tragedy only if you look at it as separated and truncated. The tale told by an idiot is not life, but the description of life by those who don’t see it straight.
This statement can be easily proved by experience. Remembering that “by their fruits you shall know them,” look at the psychological results of
a) Believing that the world (that is, reality) is whole, sane, purposive, benign, and that you are self-sufficient yet connected, sustained yet striving, curious, interested, or
b) Believing that the world is fragmented, divided, meaningless, cruel, perhaps malicious, and you are helpless or anyway besieged victims, without purpose
Does the question not answer itself?
However, we recognize that you are firmly placed in the camp of those who have faith in life – and therefore in what happens, and in one another, and in yourself. You weren’t born into that position: It is the end-result of a lifetime’s choices. Still, there you are now. This does not take away problems and perplexities, though. Life is always a problem to be worked, in the guise of many interlinked problems. So you are asking not a philosophical or abstract question, but a very practical one: How can you discern among impulses.
Obviously – we hope obviously – there cannot be one answer for every type of person and every predicament.
- Some people are very coherent, their strands cooperating smoothly and almost seamlessly, so that they never express self-division.
- Some are all self-division, struggling to live while in a perpetual internal civil war. What one strand approves, another hates. What one needs, another cannot abide.
- Most, of course, are between these extremes, but the “between” position is itself divisible into many, many different ratios.
Each psychological makeup (for that is how the coexistence of strands will be seen) requires and allows and prevents certain things, and results in many different ground-rules for that life. (In effect, each variety of relationship will experience its own rules of existence that will seem self-evident, and self-evidently true for everyone, which of course they cannot be in reality.)
We don’t want to make firm rules, here. You asked a practical question, and we want to answer it, but in a manner that will clarify the context, so as to be helpful to those of a different makeup.
If you are all of a piece, with no significant internal conflicts, trust comes easily. In such case, trust but don’t forget to verify. Trust is essential but not sufficient, because if you trust without looking out for the chance that you may be in error this once, you risk falling into Psychic’s Disease. (“I feel it strongly, so it must be right.”)
If you are habitually conflicted, your indicated course is the opposite: You need to judge and then trust. Never trusting would amount to an invitation to paralysis, certainly to an effective isolation from guidance in any conscious or semi-conscious form. So – since sooner or later you have to act out of faith – you need to use your judgment and then follow that judgment.
And, of course, those anywhere between these extremes, season to taste.
Now, here is the joker in the deck: What you are will change in effect. That is, what will manifest will change, which will look like a different you emerged. So the strategy that serves you at any one time may be inappropriate at any other time. So you need to bear that in mind.
So far this doesn’t seem all that practical.
It’s extremely practical. If you don’t understand the situation, how will you respond appropriately? Your complaint is that it is not a flat set of rules: “If A, do B.” If you want a flat rule, deduce it from what we have said, and we will criticize appropriately.
It’s circular. I hear you saying, the way to judge an impulse that may be sent from guidance is, trust guidance.
Does that formulation not expose the problem?
It does. I’m thinking of guidance as separate from myself, which it is and also isn’t.
Then try again.
If we are confronted with an impulse, sit with it, feel for it.
Even for split-second decisions to be made?
Well, I suppose split-second decisions express what we already are, since we don’t have time to decide.
Yes. What you are is what you have made yourself by a lifetime of decisions: It is what will express in the absence of deliberation. Your moments of choice come in the decisions you have time to make. That is, those you can hold and weigh in your awareness.
Mindfulness is all. What else have we been saying, all this time? The reason to take control over your hitherto unconscious mental functionings (robots, scripts, filters) is to broaden your effective scope of action. It is to widen the area in which you – and not merely the you that you have created to date – can manifest.
Life more abundantly.
Yes. The freer you are of automatic reactions, the better you can see your opportunities and the more clearly you can see them. That is, instead of seeing problems, you see opportunities embedded in the problems.
What they call the gift in the situation.
Mindfulness is all. And this is enough to be said. What you need is here.
Our thanks as always, then, and till next time.