I awoke from a dream and realized that its point was, look at your situation analytically. Rather than thinking of your life, or a specific part of your life, as if it were a problem to be fixed (or, worse, a problem that couldn’t be fixed), ask yourself, what does my being placed in just this way make possible?
It’s a small turn, maybe, but it amounts to living life in faith that we are being provided for, regardless how bad things look or feel. It eliminates despair or even fear, and sets the mind to seeing advantages (and hints) that have been there all along, unnoticed or only half-appreciated.
I think creating such a habit of looking at our life that way will transform everything, without having to transform anything.
Because of my own disorder, I am in contact with people on a daily basis who are in ongoing, life-threatening dire straits whose solution eludes them. I find these are the people who post all the spiritual “your higher self loves you” and “this is happening for a reason” sayings. Those who managed to find a solution don’t post these things, but instead go back to living reasonably normal lives. I too went through a fairly long phase of trying to find a spiritual solution to a physical problem. I concluded that it is only in insoluble and intolerable circumstances that people start saying “this must be happening for a reason and I need to trust Spirit.” I never see those posts from people who have been able to solve the problem. To me, it is like any other clinging to religion, that when there is nowhere to go, that is when the people start up with the faith stuff. I see it as a coping mechanism.
Well, the way you see it is the way you see it. That doesn’t invalidate what others know and / or experience, though.
What a profound and simple adjustment! I love the idea of what does it make possible? Who ever thinks of challenges that way? Will give it a try 🙂
I am reading Living a Safe Universe by Lynda Madden Dahl, one of the co-founders of the Seth Network (thinking you must know her) I am really relating to her exercises in perception. In one of them,she suggests one visualize (maybe accept is a better term) throughout the day that our being is being reformed countless times a second through our intent, the being creating the new reality constantly and not viewing it as time passing. I don’t know if that it explains it well enough but the practice allows me to feel my being coming from the larger non3D strand that you described. I find it challenging to find the concrete things(like what you just dreamt about) that turn these concepts we talk about into anchored and visceral knowledge. She also has a chapter on Trust. Anyway, her work made me think of yours…..
As always, thank you.
Kate
I don’t know anyone in the Seth network, though i have great respect for the Seth material. As to your saying, ” I find it challenging to …” I would say you are doing exactly what Rita advises: You are wrestling with the material. That is the only way to make it real, to prove or disprove its validity for you. Well done!
Well, Frank, you know us– and tho I am not in any ‘official’ way ‘in the Seth network,Craig and I actually ‘met’ (on-line initially) visiting a Seth -related site, and I have been deliciously immersed in reading Jane Robert’s 40+ books (some over and over again- yet ever-freshly) ever since 1974.. and, for the past 5 years or so, Craig has been reading methodically and chronologically thru the Seth book list starting with The Early Sessions.. all of which is to say- you do
know some ‘Sethies’– aka ‘Black Sheep of the Universe’ 😉 !!
Thank you again, Frank, for your candor in sharing your experiences. If it wasn’t for faith/trust (and I am still rather tentative with these approaches), there are times (like this last week) where I feared I would fall into despair/hopelessness. One of the worst things ever said to me, by a Psychiatrist, when I dared mention that I was also “using prayer and meditation” to help w/ an issue/illness I was having that year, was “well, that won’t address the underlying problem.” Major “slug in the guts”!
Again, it gets back to trusting my own experience as I journey onwards. And to those who would call MY experiences “delusional”, I would ask “how did you get inside of MY head; please LEAVE, posthaste!!” Believe me, I am questioning my experiences at every turn (“wrestling w/ the material”), saying, “yes; this is all well and interesting–and I still want to go further with this.” For me, anyway, “faith” and “belief” DO have a definitely valuable place in my life-journey–if “only” as a place/premise to start with; it is up to me to do the work to verify, at least construct a “working model” for now.’
And hello, Kate! I have also read most of the Lynda Madden Dahl books, and I think, esp. w/ her “Safe Universe” series: “Now THERE’s a person who’s really making the “Seth material” work for her!!” My wife (who’s also just posted on this thread) helped “put me on” the “Seth” books; I started w/ “The Early Sessions” about five years ago, which are valuable, to me, in “getting the Seth lingo”, which is rather different from other sources.
So, allow me to raise a cyber-toast to “Trust” and “Faith”, and now I’ll get back to living it!
Craig
> Major “slug in the guts”!
I think, as a strategy for dealing with materialist / behavioralist therapists, that’s a very appropriate strategy, if you can get away with it without being charged for assault and battery. (And, who knows, may be worthwhile even if you do!) 🙂 There really ought to be a category called spiritual malpractice.
Hah! I like that “approach” when dealing w/ those in the so-called “helping professions”, who say things like that! And ditto on the “spiritual malpractice” idea!
Actually, I felt as if I had been dealt a major slug in the solar plexus when this “professional” made that comment; had to “work thru” that one for quite a while. Interestingly, what helped me was doing some of the “Focus 10” (esp. “Sleep”) exercises I had on tape; that Summer I took a leave-of-absence from work to deal w/ the health challenges I was going thru–physical and emotional…
Craig
The up-side of the experience is that you worked through it, and thus came out stronger.
I, that which I truly am, is not a body or talk, talk ever rationalizing, brain, is not a physical life, is not about suffering. The Buddha pointed that out a long time ago, but refused to engage in metaphysical rationalizations. Rather, he pointed out ways for each of us to discern the truth for ourselves, truth that didn’t fit snugly into words, by letting loose of ownership of what is happening in our lives. At about the same time, Lao Tsu was advising “non-doing”. Then, there is that Upanishadic “Thou art That”. I’ve wrestled with those for much of my life, but my little brain just couldn’t understand. I had read of the experiments indicating that what seems to be our, that is our rational brain’s, willfulness isn’t free, that what seems to be our willful acts are actually after the fact story-ridden comments. As a wise man or two have noted, the physical we are actually being lived. Who, what is living us? Frank, your discussion of reincarnation gives us the clue. As Rita has explained, we are here as extensions of our high beings, probes designed if you will that permit our higher beings to explore 3D and thereby learn and evolve. In just the last couple of months, the awareness that which I truly am, call it my greater self, mind, or maybe heart lives my every action, including typing these words. Yes, I continually forget, but increasingly less so. The brain and other parts of the physical body are tools, amazingly sophisticated tools, but they are not me. All those pains and, yes, delights are experiences to be treasured, the reasons we are here. How is that for a better story? Don
Much better story. And your commentm which applies to all of us, i suspect — “I’ve wrestled with those for much of my life, but my little brain just couldn’t understand” — shows how very much we have to be grateful for, to be living in these transitional times. We have had to wrestle our way to a broader understanding, and as Rita says (hardly alone in that!), you have to wrestle with it to really possess it.
Thank you, Don, for your insights; indeed, I’d echo Frank in saying that this is a “better story”. I’ve read and seen videos of, various Buddhist students/monks, holding seemingly endless debates, accompanied by much wrist-slapping, and bead-rattling. Eventually, they get to a point of “running out of words” and fall silent. A good clue that “words are inadequate to express the Ineffable”.
I’d also read of the scientific studies, where the brain seems to react after the “fact” of moving one’s finger, and those where the body shows a reaction to an image on a computer–before the computer has selected the image. Another study, “HeartMath”, I believe, shows how the heart’s field (electromagnetic?) shows a change way ahead of the brain. Of course, in relating these studies, I recognize the limits of language, and having to “step thru” the ideas in “time-slices”.
This discussion is helping me, esp. since over the past week I’ve been “worrying myself”, probably needlessly (“…suffering is optional”?) with “the Big Questions”. And indeed, I’ve “done a good job of forgetting”, but as I often tell Susan, “it’s gotten to the point where the forgetting is hurting,” which is an indication to me that old ideas, w/ which I was brought up (“Trust the Experts”, combined w/ a lot of intellectual “sneering” at those who showed more emotion than we did, et.c.) no longer “work” for me, and I haven’t quite accepted that my view of 3D Theatre may be just as valid as anyone else’s; my way of exploring is unique (hence, the “unique window each of us offers our Source Selves–a Jane Roberts term–onto 3D, thus helping to ‘grow’ Source”).
I’ve had other insights this morning, too many to go into here, and I’m still grappling w/ the question of “free will, vs. being a puppet”. Again, the word “Experience” comes up over and over. A clue for me, perhaps, methinks…?
Interesting as always, and again thanks, Don, for a reminder to look at myself a different, more expanded way…
Craig
Thanks,Craig&Nancy and Kate.
Don too of course.
I have read all the books by Linda Madden-Dahl as well.
The impression by to read the books are Freedom…”Living Free,”so to speak,and it is demanding Courage(if you asks me that is).
Edgar Cayce have some very good key-interpretations about dreams:”Dreams are as real as your daily life.”
And then Edgar Cayce comes to mind again,he says:”Judge not lest ye be judged”.
And another one:”Let be looking at the life as”a humdrum”to overcome,be happy in to be alive this time around.” (in”our”time)…Maybe this one reading likewise:
“Know Thyself to be Yourself,yet One with The Whole.”
Much mundane wisdom in it.
B&B,Inger Lise.
P.S. I have come to see to have learned a whole lot(esp.very grounded and fundamental)by Edgar Cayce.
Frank, may I repost this article to a friend?
Of course. It enables me to annoy more people, more efficiently. 🙂
Thank you!
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Anyone know who said that one?
Nietzche, in The Twilight of the Idols