Thursday, October 7, 2021
6:30 a.m. So I guess the tip line is open at night now. I got a thought in the middle of the night but I was too tired to get up and write it. I trusted that if it was important, you’d nudge me. Ideas stemming from the main idea started to come; it felt like how you follow one thought and then follow the branches. But, as I say, I was too tired. The thought was this: What if it isn’t that we are shaped by what happens to us, but that what happens to us stems from what we are from the very beginning? And yes, setting slide-switches to maximum focus, clarity, receptivity, objectivity.
An unsuspected side-effect, you see. You are starting to think like us not merely in ideas, but in how you come to things.
By all means, pursue that, but let’s go after the insight first.
Oh yes. You all know people who have been entirely unable to get over childhood traumas, or difficulties in later life, that seem to be a case of their having been plopped into an insupportable position for no reason. Some blame it on chance, some on a malign fate (that is, on the universe), or, in another age, on the gods. What all this has in common is a sense of outrage (that is, of injustice; the outrage may be cold or hot) and, beneath that, a sense of victimhood, of helplessness.
Be it bad health, or abuse, or deprivation, or a hostile or indifferent environment, many people find themselves adults who had to struggle to survive something major. Often enough, adding to their aggravation, even their already white-hot anger, people may in a well-meaning way suggest that these circumstances had beneficial side-effects such as strengthened character or whatever. The benefits may well be true, but it is no comfort when someone asks “why?” and the questioning itself is part of the pain.
Let alone when someone suggests that what happened was somehow their own fault.
Exactly. And as you all know, in trying to wake someone out of a sense of victimhood, it is very easy to be perceived as doing just that. Because, “If it didn’t happen unjustly, it must have happened justly – and that means, you’re saying it is my own fault.”
The people asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (A question, by the way, that convinced me that they must have assumed reincarnation, for otherwise how could he have been born blind for having sinned?) The assumption seems to have been: A just God would not cause suffering, yet not all suffering in the world was caused by other people, so what gives?
The insight we hope to explore may help people resolve some of these difficulties, if we go at it slowly and methodically. Remember – we keep reminding you – the goal is to live life more abundantly (that is, to be freer of hampering conditions) as a prelude to your continuation. Or perhaps we should say, so as to maximize the gift you bring (which is yourself) to The Other Side when your career enters another stage.
Yes. I take it for granted.
The key insight is that the “external” world is part of you, and you of it. Your life extracts from the world what it needs (or you might also say it extracts what it resonates to, what it has velcro for). If you once really grasp that, you grasp the impossibility of injustice in the world, regardless of appearances.
Impossibility of injustice doesn’t mean impossibility of pain, of course.
Of course it does not. But that isn’t what is important here. Having a tooth extracted by a dentist, or having a tooth knocked out in a brawl, may both feel more or less the same, in terms of physical pain, but the meaning of the pain is entirely different. How often you have heard us say that “we do sympathize with your feeling pain (in various regards), but the pain is so useful.” Useful to you, obviously, not to us. But we can see it from a perspective.
If you will live in faith that your pain is not caused by chance, that frees you up somewhat. If you realize that neither is it caused by the malice of fate, that helps too. If you realize that it was not your fault either before or during this life, that helps too. Then if you can get to where you see that the physical perpetrators themselves were less evil than careless, or were less cause than agent, you are very close to resolving something. And it is that resolution we hope to help facilitate.
I am anxious to hear it. Oddly, though, I am less aware of where you are going with this than I was in the middle of the night.
Patience. Re-center on objectivity, and let’s see if bullet-points will help us.
- All the world is mind-stuff. No matter how solid it seems, mind-stuff, as of course are you.
- There is no “other” except in your perception. If you cannot believe this, you cannot follow the argument even tentatively. But belief, as we said, is doubt. That is, you believe/doubt until you know. Believe, at least tentatively, if you can: There is no “other.”
- There is no disconnect between you as an individual and the shared subjectivity, because there can’t Appearance is one thing, reality is another. You – we – are all part of the same everything.
- “You” didn’t even exist as you, until you were placed into life. You are the product of the combination of many strands mentally and, call it, spiritually, in the same way that you are the product of the combination of many strands of genetic materials.
In other words, we didn’t wind up who we are, where we were, as we were, by accident.
No, of course not. But let us continue.
- The conditions that existed at your birth reflect what you were, or you could not have been born then. You could argue that some compromises have to be made, and we wouldn’t argue the point. Still, it remains: You exactly fit your time and place, no matter how little it feels like it, because there is no other way you could have been born.
- Now, along with what you want to do in life, there are also all the things you have to do. True in ordinary life, true metaphysically no less. We need you “here” but for you to be there it is necessary that you live with X as well as Y. Any given X may be painful or inconvenient, and may or may not bring beneficial side-effects, but it is there because part of you responds to it. If no part of you responds to a stimulus, you won’t even notice it is there, perhaps. At any rate, you will not experience it as a problem. It will be a non-issue.
- By definition, all the things you experience are relevant to your life. (As we say, if irrelevant, you won’t notice them, hence in a way won’t experience them.) But “relevant” is not the same as “obviously relevant.” Many things in your life are a mystery. It shouldn’t be a surprise that pain and the cause of pain should be, as well, sometimes.
- However, and here we come to the nub of it, any given problem, petty or severe, temporary or chronic, has no power to elicit more than a first-tier reaction. It is your second-tier reaction, and your third-tier reaction, ultimately, that determine the effect on you of any given stimulus, pleasant or unpleasant.
- And finally – bearing in mind our iteration yesterday of the ways you may choose to expand, one of them being to explore your unconscious mind with all the traumas and sources of frozen development – the question is not, “What happened to you?” It is always, “What are you doing about it?” Are you going to wallow in self-pity? Reinforce your sense of helplessness? Tough it out, ignoring the pain? “Offer it up,” as the good sisters used to advise? Analyze it to death? Channel your sense of injustice toward society as a whole? These are all common responses, and understandable. But do they help anybody do anything more than endure?
- You may forgive, and this is a good first step. But when you see deeply enough, you see that there is nothing to forgive. When you get that far, you have reason to congratulate yourself, if only provisionally.
And that’s your hour, and a little more. Call it, perhaps “How we shape what happens to us.” That doesn’t quite work, perhaps you can do better.
In any case, our thanks for all this.