Living with competing impulses

Monday, September 27, 2021

6:55 a.m. Yesterday you said that combining the virtues with the values we are here to embody amounts to a set of ideals.

I find myself moved to add “objectivity” to my slide-switches. What’s that about?

You were seeing yourself from “outside” again at that moment, after an interval of several days, and “objectivity” – seeing yourself at a little distance while you do this – will not only help the data flow but will help your movement into a new place to be.

Okay. We’ll see if the sensation lasts. Writing it down helps: It will remind me whenever I re-read this.

Speaking of which, you will remember that we were talking about how to stabilize a point of view – how to crystallize one’s being – by forming habits that will provide continual reference points.

You didn’t put it in those terms, exactly, but yes, I remember.

You are not accustomed to thinking of ideals as supports for habits, nor of habits as the foundations of a permanent character at its deeper levels, but this is so. You have experienced what it is to live without external props, and if you don’t mind, it will help if you discuss it in public here. It will help you; it will help some others.

The old psychic strip-tease again.

You are more articulate in writing than in speech, and more open in (temporary) private than face to face. This will work better than confession or psychiatry.

Yeah, ,thanks.

It will also serve as a gift.

Yes, I see that. I have been struck, more than once, by how my gratuitous confessions have affected this or that person, striking a chord. That does make up for it, it is true. Very well.

Here we will have you insert a sigh.

Very funny. All right. I was raised in a very strict home, my mother’s beliefs and strictures being an exact match for the things being inculcated in Catholic school. This provided me no room to breathe, in a way – and yes, I see the physical analogy as I write this. My father’s values and beliefs were not exactly in line with my mother’s piety and unswerving adherence to the church, but dad’s differences were tacit, never expressed. I don’t remember how much or how precisely I sensed his reservations or even disagreements, but he never voiced them. I think the arrangement between them – probably come to without words, mutually understood by what they were, if it followed the pattern of the rest of their lives – was that mom would have the setting of the household beliefs. That’s an awkward way to put it. What she believed, we were to believe; I guess that’s closer, and dad would not interfere, even if he had known how to.

My childhood was entirely shaped by these beliefs and particularly by the things understood and never discussed. (Sex, for instance, was never discussed.) And because we lived a little bit out of town, and because I was so often sick that I developed the habit of providing my own mental world (though I never thought of it that way), and because, in short, I did not have the casual friendships that go along with childhood, I had no de facto counterweights to mother and church. I wonder, is that why I took to reading books way beyond what would be expected at my age? Churchill and Lincoln at age 13, say? Or did the reading distance me from a normal life? Both, I suppose.

Anyway, these childhood beliefs and values went unchallenged until they broke away at the first tap of the hammer.

Try not to elide. You need not spell out the “what” of it, but the “how” may be significant. Better, the “therefore.”

Once I ceased to believe what I had been taught because I had been taught it, and had to start thinking for myself, I found myself at sea. I suppose other people learn to think for themselves little by little; I didn’t have it that smooth.

Let’s stop there, for you are seriously distorting things. The stories one tells oneself have their own logic, but they don’t necessarily conform to external or let’s say “objective” reality.

They aren’t what happened, you mean.

More, they aren’t springing from the sources, nor in the manner, that you assume. You are observing a result and inventing a course of actions that much have led to that result. This is common enough, but you are always better off if you have someone to call you on it when you are doing it, or you may go farther and farther into fantasy, unknowingly.

Lying to ourselves?

Not intentionally. Making up a story behind your own back, then buying the story. As we say, it is common, and often does no harm.

So what is the real story?

What is more important is: What is the real divergence? And in this case it stems from your reluctance to dig deep. As we said, try not to elide.

And maybe it isn’t anybody’s business.

Hit that “objective” switch.

Very funny. I am still – at this point – experiencing myself watching myself, but that doesn’t mean that any layer of me (of us?) is inclined to unnecessary revelation.

Yet you are told in the scriptures that in the next world all that was kept secret will be revealed.

I don’t mind waiting.

Now it’s our turn to say it. Very funny. Jump, then, from the fact that you ceased to believe what you had grown up believing, to where that new territory left you.

Garbled that, probably, but I know what you’re asking. Well, I didn’t know what to believe. I was open to suggestion, but not in a constructive way. If I had had a reliable guide and could have trusted him – or her, actually – I suppose I might have acquired a new and comfortable set of beliefs, but I didn’t have one, couldn’t find one, and probably couldn’t have trusted one if one had appeared.

Yet only a few years later you were reading “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”

And so he did, unrecognized as a teacher for a while, but he did appear. I suppose “ready” in this context means “ready to welcome him and learn from him.”

Even though you didn’t know what to believe, how to act, what habits to adopt, how to judge internal promptings. You were at sea in a way we wish you would set out.

Seems like you just did. And I see the connection now. You said you were going to discuss the limitations to our reliance on the inner voice.

Personal experience honestly related brings an air of truth that courts conviction.

Well, for a long, long time I was a creature of impulses without logic. Still am, too often.

That is far from specific. Not yet helpful. In this case the “how” of it is important.

Well, say I had an impulse to do something. I imagine everybody has impulses to do things, all the time. But life teaches us to check these impulses – and I mean “check” in two senses: check as in “examine” and check as in “resist.” But I wanted to think of myself as a psychic, I suppose. I valued each impulse as if it were a prompting from the presumably all-knowing Other Side. So the idea of checking or checking up on them seemed to be the same as turning my back on the Other Side and aligning myself with the materialists.

You see why the detail becomes important?

I guess I do, yes. It is important to know that I suddenly, violently, thrust away my belief in God and therefore everything that went with it. (Although, unthinking creature of habit that I am), I continued to go to Mass every Sunday until I realized in my Freshman year in college that I didn’t have to.

It is embarrassing to write, but the afternoon that John F. Kennedy was killed, I went to church and prayed that it be reversed, and when of course it wasn’t, not only was I emotionally dead but so was my belief in God. It is a silly reaction, as though my personal prayer should rewrite the world, and the absence of fulfilment of the prayer prove that God didn’t exist, but here it was.

Not illogical at all, but the premises and the process were beyond your mental and emotional ken at the time. You see, a part of you knew that the past could be rewritten: Why else were you reading of Civil War battles, trying to make them come out different? But you didn’t know how it could be done, and of course your contemporary mind (call it) regarded the idea as nonsense. You knew – in an inaccessible part of your total being – that prayer is always answered, so the fact that the prayer coming from the part of your total being that you identified with (the 17-year-old boy, in other words) was not answered left you disillusioned, shattered, and furious.

Interesting. It isn’t that I ceased to believe in God; it’s that I was angry with him.

Angry, betrayed, orphaned, yes. And why?

Well, I suppose it was inevitable as long as I was coming to it from what I was and what I believed.

Yes. But say more.

That idea of God is a very crude and simplistic idea. It is us here and God there; humans as creatures and God as creator. Humans as subjects and God as director of the show. It doesn’t have any of the redefinitions you have been providing for these couple of decades.

You humans – if we may distance ourselves that way for the moment – are half animal kingdom, half celestial kingdom. Half human, half divine. Creator beings themselves created. You know all this. What you called God was actually your remembered or intuited experience of your next larger self, of which you are a creation, true, but it is not God in any ultimate sense such as popular religion would have God be.

And yet I knew that -. Oh, I see. That’s one more reason I was so lost.

Continue if you can.

Oh, I can, though we are well past our usual hour. I could  not believe in God, or therefore anything I had been taught explicitly and implicitly. But did that mean I couldn’t believe in non-physical aspects of reality? I couldn’t stand that idea, but that seemed to be where I was left.

And there you are. Unable to believe but remembering your teachings, you were among atheists (whether or not they knew they were atheists) and could see the shortcomings of that belief system but could not find a logical way out.

So I went looking in the realm of the paranormal: specifically, Edgar Cayce via a book my brother gave me. But I had no way to connect Cayce to my life.

That had to wait a bit. But now you remember clearly the links. It is a reward for honest dredging, past the point of discomfort. And notice, the discomfort is not really so much about telling others as about telling yourself.

Well, yes and no.

All right, yes and no – but at least partially yes. Now, we are still sneaking up on the subject of living with competing impulses, trying to determine which is the authentic inner voice. We’ll continue next time.

I’m still awake at the moment.

Yes. You will find it easier and easier to remain an observer of yourself as you practice. At first it is a gifted moment, then it becomes a recurring thing, then you learn how to invite it, then you realize that who and what you are now comes in a different package, and you are living, not only believing, your being more than your 3D definitions.

Our thanks for all this, as usual.

(8:25 a.m.)