Sep
4
A Little Pattern
Filed Under Awakening
There is an internal conspiracy going on. Actually, there are a bunch of them, but a particularly relevant one revealed itself yesterday during the Carmel Cluster Call.
Click to listen, more sound files throughout the content. Cut 01 from Carmel Call:
Boxing and Asleep 01-Boxing and Asleep
What we commonly call a “mood” is a predisposition that is a result of the lack or excess of attention on one particular thing or level to the exclusion of another thing or level. (Either way, what we end up with is ignoring one’s deeper self.) Mood is the nature of the ground that the seed falls on.
Cut 02 from Carmel Call: Check out Time 02-Check out time
The ground I’m referring to is “the way you are” to receive the results of a search. A search is the process we use when trying to make sense of or respond to anything. A search is composed of a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is diving deeply into ourselves, finding something, and then bringing that something back into our attention.
A search is roughly analogous to playing with a yo-yo. When you’re holding the yo-yo, it is within your focus of attention. Once you throw the yo-yo it begins the descent into who you really are, and at a certain point, your attention can’t go any further. And so the rest of the journey down into yourself, is done without any attention at all. Once the yo-yo reaches the end of the string, it reverses course and begins the return trip up where attention reappears just as it disappeared on the way down. (This often happens at very same point.) Because most people are unaware of all that goes on outside their attention, they mistakenly think they are privy to the entire search process; but they never are. The result this kind of search produces is based both on what it can find but is determined even more by the distortion in the reception it receives when it returns to the levels where attention can spin it.
Cut 03 from Carmel Call: Searches CC-09-01-09-03-Searches
On the Carmel Cluster Call, I asked Barry about his relationship with his twenty-something daughter. It’s what he did before he began to answer that is particularly relevant. He, as is predictable, went on a search—but he did so in a certain way. He began the search with a predisposition, a mood, not of newness nor of curiosity but of upset and melancholy.
Rather than discovering what his relationship with his daughter was, he chose to build a box first. In doing so, he limited his search; and because he has specific emotional responses to that limitation, these emotions appeared to be pointed toward his daughter. If you say to an Arab, “I have a Jew that I want you to meet”, it is possible (at least in many cases) that the Arab would bring a background interpretation to his or her response to the invitation. If you were to say to the Arab, “I am someone I want you to meet.” You would probably receive a different reaction. Barry, rather than creating his relationship with his daughter, determined (based on his own predispositions) what his relationship was.
Cut 04 from Carmel Call: Another Search 04-Another Search
When asked about his daughter, Barry didn’t create anything…he reacted. He reacted in a particular, habituated way that appears to him as being safer than being open—but is a degree of closed. The seed of the question fell on ground that was only preferentially fertile. Barry maintains an other-than-conscious representation of how he would like his relationship to be with his daughter. (Moses supposes his toeses are roses.) He isn’t aware of how he wants his relationship with his daughter to be. That information resides at too deep a level for him to even doubt it.
In other words, the only way we can doubt something is if we know it is there. If we haven’t a clue…whatever it is, remains true.
Cut 05 from Carmel Call: Game Begins 05-Game Begins
But Barry doesn’t stop there. On a slightly more shallow level, Barry thinks he knows what his relationship with his daughter is. (But Moses supposes erroneously.) First, Barry thinks (without attention) about what his relationship with his daughter is; then, on a more shallow level (but still without attention) he thinks he knows what it is. The gap between these two—how he imagines it could be and how he thinks it is—hurts. And this is the center of the conspiracy. These two representations are so different and so fully in disagreement that Barry must defend himself. So he does what nearly any educated American human will do: he thinks. He tries to fill the gap between these warring factions by coming up with answers to my simple question that defend and pretend that there is no gap. He also limits his search and, thereby, limits himself and causes suffering, constriction and maybe even bad breath.
Barry’s process of maintaining warring factions—while pretending (at least to himself and then to the world) that he isn’t—institutionalizes certain ways of approaching life. The two representations of his daughter mirror and metaphor two representations about life. He has an other-than-conscious representation of how life should be and he also thinks he knows how life is. These two are at odds and everything about Barry is a reaction to the war between these two irreconcilable aspects of his character.
Cut 06 from Carmel Call: Dying Inbetween 06-dieing inbetween
These two, and their ability to disagree and not get along endlessly (thus far), conspire to make Barry who he is. Not who he really is, but who he is just below the surface…just below the level that he can attend to. Barry makes up all these interpretations, but he can’t enjoy creating them because he is not aware of doing so; they are his sole creations and have little or no root in any sort of reality. (For nobody’s toeses are posies of roses as Moses supposes his toeses to be.)
Everything Barry does is influenced by this mood: the result of every search, his experience of each moment, every action, reaction, and relation. He constantly limits himself, tries to control himself, and inhibits his “real” self. How? By reacting first and constantly to the existence and trauma of living in this gap. While we all miss almost everything almost all the time, Barry has a particular way of doing this—a particular mood that influences every thought he has, every breath he takes, and every moment of his life. There are many results of this process, such as: loss of relationship with his daughter, difficulty doing his job, and the constant conversation that life isn’t as it should be. But the most consistent result is that Barry doesn’t like or trust himself.
Cut 07 from Carmel Call: More Random Practice 07-More Random Practice
Barry has the luxury of this particular interface with himself because he has begun the journey back to discovering who he really is; but he hasn’t completed it. There are plenty of people with less self-awareness who have no clue that they don’t like themselves or that there’s more to life than they can currently think or imagine. Barry has earned the perception of this particular discomfort; and with assistance, he will more further into it and discover himself as the author of it. He will learn how to bring attention to ever-deeper levels of himself: aligning more of himself behind how his life really is. He will clean out these predispositions, similar to how a dentist drills out decay in a tooth. If he continues this work, he will naturally wake-up a little more and a little more until he is able to freely attend to any and all aspects of himself.
If Barry wants to escape from this inherent smallness and discover the world at large, attention (awareness) will have to show up earlier in his process of living. First, he may have to discover that he has a predisposition that is guiding his every perception, thought, and moment. Just imagine! No matter what you have thought, experienced, or created…they are all influenced by parts of yourself that you really don’t know anything about and can’t perceive, let alone control.
With some attention, both you and Barry can wander the path back to earlier and earlier aspects of who you are and discover a purity, acuity, and presence that represents who you really are and isn’t throttled, choked and abandoned by who you pretend to be.
Cut 08 from Carmel Call: Alice Searches 08-Alice Searches
The Trip Back
Barry will need to play with attention to explore these deeper parts of himself. Attention is our purely human gift. It is an ability to focus, it is awareness with a focus. Attention focused on attention generates awakeness. Awareness without attention is a broad interaction and ability to react or perceive that many species share. Attention on anything other than attention results in reactions which are symptoms of sleepiness. When I first asked Barry about his relationship with his daughter, I posed the question using a huge, open frame. This forced him to either adopt the frame (providing an expansive search) or limit the frame (to defend himself, in advance. against the question, any answer he might find, and life in general).
Cut 9 from Carmel Call: Moods 09-Moods
When interacting with Barry, it is my job to discover what kind of search he chooses to undertake. This is a simple process for me—composed primarily of kinesthetic responses to the spaces between Barry’s thoughts—but it wasn’t always simple. It took loads of unwind
ing and awakening and play with sensory acuity independent of judgment to witness what might appear to most people to be a small or even non-existent moment. I don’t necessarily expect you to believe I can do this or that it’s even possible. People who have worked with me for a while have seen this happen so many times they no longer doubt it. In fact, they’re in the process of learning how to glean so much from so little. I call this ability homeopathic perception.
Cut 10 from Carmel Call: Practicing Relationship 10-Practicing Relationship
One aspect of exploring the spaces where Barry can go but doesn’t is the willingness to feel what Barry is feeling but doesn’t want to (and often doesn’t know that he is). There are many aspects of this light shining on obscurity. For now, it is sufficient for you to imagine there are all sorts of things going on with you that you are not yet able to focus your attention on. If you learn to focus your attention on these things, you would know yourself better and experience yourself as far more expansive, open, loving, and present. The trip back to who you are is the very trip that we have come to Earth to undertake.
Cut 11 from Carmel Call: Harshness 11-Harshness
Once I discovered that Barry was limiting his search and how he was limiting it, I backed off a little. Rather than telling him not to limit his search or try to have him do something else, I directed his attention to a little game. This little game is to explore, in a non-challenging way, the connections between his words. This “Nonsense Game” led him into the spaces, into the searches between things. While coaching him, I offered him different ways of connecting things. All the while, I was not really making it obvious what it was I was going after. Being direct often gets in the way of the sense of play and wonderment we’re after here. There are many parts and aspects of ourselves that we need to sneak up on.
Cut 12 from Carmel Call: The Blessed Shift 12-The Blessed Shift
However, I did explain some of what I was doing for the sake of a few people on the call who are advanced enough to catch on. While this process began with Barry, it applied equally to everyone else on the call and to all of us who have minds and defenses (which seems to be all of us). This is why I have others on the call play with the same exercise.
The nature of each person’s spaces is different. Each space is a different flavor and a varied mood. And each one undergoes a similar process to generate this mood. It involves engaging in a pre-attentive process of playing some ideal and unnoticed representation against a representation of how things are. This generates a predisposition (i.e., war) to defend who we really are from who we are pretending to be.
Discovering who we really are isn’t necessarily easy or hard; it is rigorous as it requires continued exploration with attention. Given our creation of artificial and pretend selves and our tendency to instantly believe our creations, we will likely perceive the journey back to be fairly difficult. The journey isn’t difficult, but our likely resistance to it—especially when it gets too real, too fast—makes the journey both epic and monumental. It is a very short journey and it often takes a long time. But the good news is you can enjoy it even when it is awful. Just remember that it’s a journey and that this is what you’re here to do.
Cut 13 from Carmel Call: Patience 13-Patience
Because I’ve been working with Barry for a while (and because several others on the call have also been playing around my work for some time), we are able to enter into a deep, loving, open space. Once we get there, I test this space by asking Barry, once again, about his relationship with his daughter. This time, Barry is present to nearly infinite answers and uses the question not as a query about his daughter but as an opportunity to celebrate his own existence. The nature of his search is pure, endless, and profound. He has taken this journey in less than an hour’s time, and finds himself in awe of both himself and the world around him. Several other people on the call report the same sort of experience.
The conversion of a small restrictive search to an awe inspiring expansive exploration of “self” is part of the magic of this work. We go on so many searches each day—naming and trying to make sense of things, relating moments inside ourselves with movements outside—that dancing with our searches and our ability to attend to them yields, like a tiny rudder on a huge ship, the ability to navigate our lives with ease and pleasure through thick and thinking.
Cut 14 from Carmel Call: Positive Predisposition 14-Positive Predisposition
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