Absorbing new material intellectually is satisfying, sometimes exciting. But how hard it can be to actually live it!
It is good to become thoroughly familiar with the Cayce work, or Seth, or scriptures, or the guys upstairs. Certainly all that wisdom can enrich our lives. But if we can’t apply it, what good does it do us? We know so much more than we know how to live. But every once in a while…
Last month, my friend Charles and I were shown a simple concept to overcome a stubborn underlying problem.
Charles is very rational, very intellectual, quite at home with metaphysical concepts. He has done extensive reading in metaphysical and philosophical subjects. (Also, he has a positive genius for explicating complicated concepts by clothing them in entertaining stories. For instance, Motorcycle Enlightenment, the novel that Hampton Roads published.)
But sometimes life and matters of feeling and human relationships leave him baffled. [Gee, I wonder what that would feel like!]
On the one hand, he knows that things don’t “just happen” in our lives; that problems are opportunities, in that they are manifestations of things within us that need attention. But on the other hand, sometimes he looks back on his life and has to ask himself how he could have made this or that bad decision.
From years of introspection, he had come to identify a pattern. As long as a problem involved the rational mind, he could deal with it, and usually quite easily. But anything that involved the emotions – and what human relationships don’t involve the emotions? – led his rational, thinking mind to flee, turning over the helm to an emotional part that reacts – as one would expect – emotionally.
The result was bad decisions made impulsively and regretted at leisure when the thinking part came back. He knew that this pattern developed as a result of an early childhood trauma (which is his business, not ours). But knowing it is not the same as overcoming it.
Talking about it, we found an insight forming, and a practical way to apply it.
Charles is a Virgo, God help him. 😊 He is at home with spreadsheets and anything practical. Business was always easy for him, because, as he says, “numbers made sense.”
As we discussed his situation, the metaphor arose. I said, in effect, “You have two spreadsheets, one intellectual and one emotional, and the problem is that the two don’t communicate. When one enters the room, the other leaves. What you need to do is to sync the two, so that they will learn to work together.”
(Charles points out that the understanding seated in for him when I said that when the emotions were triggered, his IQ went to 0. He says, “That’s what registered first for me. I guess it was because my mental-rational part found it both humorous and partly insulting, so it wanted to understand how it could improve itself…I don’t know. I just know it worked.”)
He tried it, and that began a cascade of positive changes. We can see the results already, sometimes in minor things, sometimes in things that are not so minor. I don’t’ see any reason to think it won’t continue to work for him.
Now, this idea of syncing your emotional and rational spreadsheets may not seem like any big deal, but, if you sometimes find yourself making bad decisions for reasons that baffle you, you might try it. I offer it for what it is worth.