TGU – Getting out of our own way

September 11, 2007

Und so, my friends. This has the look of a long planned setup. The only book I (more or less) completed, and it becomes the key, finally, after I give up.

[This referred to my projected book Imagine Yourself Well, which Hampton Roads had just committed to publishing. In the event, however, we were unable to agree on terms.]

After you give up one way of seeing or structuring things. You know that somehow this had become a straitjacket, but you still don’t know quite how, because so much of the associations involved are unconscious.

What changed is that suddenly you were willing to be practical, to write what would sell, to realize fully that not one book buying new freedom was the way, but a series of books maintaining you in freedom.

Yet this is only part of it. Also – you are going to write what you know (at whatever level you know it) rather than trying to write more than you know, which would be a form of lying if that weren’t impossible for you.

You are now focused on writing what you are an expert on – can there be anything more appropriate, or easier? And you aren’t now focused on saving the world or on expressing your own experience blow-by-blow, but something in between.

Expressing your point of view – as a point of view, not as the truth or – worse – The Truth – is something you knew many, many years ago, but never absorbed into what was already a calcified dream.

Yes, I see it now: giving up the dream as it was somehow allowed it to be updated from where I am now, and it was back within seconds (so to speak) because it was never wrong in the first place, only calcified.

Yes. And this applies to other things in your life, and in anyone’s life. If you have held a dream for so long – and is deferred, and deferred until you sicken of disappointment and despair – there is a reason why it is deferred. The Ford Maddox Ford book The Good Soldier asks “Why can’t people have what they want?” And we would answer, “They can. They always get what they want, depending on who `they’ refers to, and what `want’ means in context.”

That is almost clear but not quite.

The version of you that formulated that dream passed away long ago – but the dream latched onto your continuing form. The `want’ attached to it similarly was obsolete – it does not match your state of being – but did not pass away.

Once again? Another try?

You have often joked about it, how lucky people are that they don’t live the life that their teenage selves would have envisioned. Yet in some ways you do, you all do. This is one more advantage of increased consciousness; it allows you to update your files, your vision of possibilities, your preferred outcomes. Indeed, it all but forces that, by the disconnect between the consciousness and its non-expression in the life one lives.

I think this idea is either so subtle or matches so ill my conscious categories of thought, that it is not coming through very clearly to me. I keep feeling that there is a knob to turn that will suddenly bring it into focus.

Perhaps. An other analogy, then. [Drawing of four stick figures, each labeled:] You at age 20. You at age 30. You at age 50. You at age 60, etc.

For each age there is a corresponding body of self-image, call it. You see yourself, think of yourself, experience yourself, differently. This is not merely internally but of course externally.

Well, you must change to meet the changes.

If you at age 50 retain the idea of yourself that you have at age 30, or anticipate the idea of yourself that you have at age 60 (as you as a boy anticipated you as an old man) you do not fit comfortably where you are.

If the idea is sexual, it can cause problems – the puer aeternis [the boy who won’t grow up] for instance. If physical (i.e. the body as an ideal) this can cause problems from over-stressing it trying to make it function as if it were as it once was. If mental, it can be a problem of rigidity, of inability to adapt. If emotional, the same.

But if it is a fixed idea, you can have the curious situation of the self having outstripped the idea. In other words, neither the physical nor mental nor emotional body is retarded or warped (so to speak) by inability to adapt – yet one or more of the bodies may be so firmly coupled to a fixed idea as to be prevented from freely manifesting. And there you were.

Did you have something in mind for the diagram we began?

Yes, but abandoned it. It would require more work to get it through before you understood the idea than to try to give the idea in words.

[Insert diagram]

If four bodies (this is an analogy, remember, using your accustomed concepts) at a given age functions at their appropriate level, you have harmony. (A)

If not, one can lag (B.) or lead (C.) or perhaps a mixture of lagging and leading (D.).

It isn’t very clear now but you can clean it up, knowing what we want to indicate. Well, if something lags it lags for a reason. If it leads, it leads for a reason. By this we mean, it was caused, we don’t necessarily mean, for a set purpose. A fixed idea can retard one of the bodies – usually the mental or emotional but it could be the physical or energetic, for ideas have consequences in how one lives.

Now if a fixed idea does not retard one of the bodies – yet nonetheless remains fixed where it does not by nature belong, it cannot manifest which can mean that it becomes even more fixed because experiences cannot modify it (make it more realistic). In such case, the discomfort must grow until the idea is abandoned.

But – as you just saw – abandoning the fixed idea means letting it loose. What is appropriate in it what is possible, what is still desired by the present-moment you, then can manifest, stripped automatically of aspects that do not belong.

We need only get out of our own way.

That is usually the case. This is just a new (to you) variant of the problem.

Thanks as always.