Life-evaluation

You might be interested in this post on my main blog.

Never Forget To Laugh

Never Forget To Laugh, biography of Bill Thetford by my friend Carol Howe. I've only just ordered it, but I have a good feeling about this one. Partly because Carol has been talking about it while writing it, and I've given my input and advice, which I'm sure has been invaluable. :-)

Sage Sagan

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.
-- Carl Sagan


And funny enough, it is where we have strong emotions that we are the most sure that we are right.

And, I've found at least in myself, that when I see others have strong emotions about something, I tend to believe them right also.

The price of ideas

To be willing to die for an idea is to set a rather high price on conjecture.
-- Anatole France

Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought for with ardor and attended to with diligence.
-- Abigail Adams, 1780

Life is full of obstacle illusions.
-- Grant Frazier

Like an ability or a muscle, hearing your inner wisdom is strengthened by doing it.
-- Robbie Gass

Morcheeba - "Enjoy The Ride"

I love the fact that the lyric line which accidentally (through being in the middle of the song) is "the day that you stop running is the day that you arrive".

O'Keeffe etc

Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.
-- Bertrand Russell

Of course there is no formula for success except perhaps an unconditional acceptance of life and what it brings.
-- Arthur Rubinstein

There is one piece of advice, in a life of study, which I think no one will object to; and that is, every now and then to be completely idle - to do nothing at all.
-- Sydney Smith

I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.
-- Georgia O'Keeffe

Quotes, vision

We go where our vision is.
-- Joseph Murphy

Holding on to anger, resentment and hurt only gives you tense muscles, a headache and a sore jaw from clenching your teeth. Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life.
-- Joan Lunden

When you build bridges you can keep crossing them.
-- Rick Pitino

Zimmermann and Du Bos

Be not so bigoted to any custom as to worship it at the expense of truth.
-- Johann Georg von Zimmermann

The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.
-- Charles Du Bos

Voltaire

Love truth, and pardon error.
-- Voltaire

Very Important Books

A quick list of my own VIBs (very important books) from recent years:

The Disappearance Of The Universe.
The one-book-on-an-island-book. For my money, the clearest and simplest overview about what is the universe, what's wrong, and what can we do about it. (Preview.)

If there's more interest in A Course In Miracles, the lectures (his books are too dry for my taste)) of Ken Wapnick. Get MP3 CDs (at facim.org) and an iPod.

Jed McKenna's three books for important things about imploding egos and the nature of Truth that nobody else tells you. This man does not sugarcoat anything. (He may be off on some details I suspect, but probably nothing major.) Read them in sequence, "Spiritual Enlightenment, the Damnedest Thing" is first.

Adyashanti's "The End of your World" (audio or paper, though the CDs are expensive) for understanding some of the mental and energy-phenomena which occur before and after awakening.

Depression is Processing

I made a big spiritual step several days ago. I knew well that it would "punish" me for days or weeks, but it felt good and important so I did it anyway.
Sure enough, since then I've been deeply in the dumps.
Seems to be lightening up now, but anyway, I was thinking about it, and the voice said "it's a blessing, you know".
"how the heck is it a blessing?"
"Well, you don't have to do anything."
"Do anything to what?"
"Do anything to get the Processing."

That's it. The depression or anxiety is what you feel when your inner gold factory is doing very heavy processing. A big insight (or say, an A Course In Miracles drill) will knock out a piece of ore (guilt/pain). And then it has to be processed, which happens automatically, like digestion. The ore has be broken down to small pieces and then melted, so you can separate the gold and throw out the rock. (Free the spirit and throw out the ego.)

Normally this is not a burden much, I guess, but when you get really good at knocking loose ore, or your mountain is starting to crumble fast, then your "factory" is running at near-overload, and what you feel is the depression or anxiety. I guess it's just the waves coming off the big amounts of guilt/pain being crushed.

Think of Byron Katie or Eckhart Tolle and so many others, they had long periods of depression or anxiety, and then suddenly one day, they were free and whole and happy. Unknowingly they had been processing like hell, and suddenly they were done!

I'd love to know what is really happening in this processing. It has to be something mechanical, otherwise it could not happen automatically and unknowingly.
I think this is a whole new area of philosophy that nobody that I'm aware of has looked at.

By the way, I think this is what Arten and Pursah is talking about when they say that if you do your job with Advanced Forgiveness (knocking loose ore), then the Holy Spirit will remove the Guilt for you (do the processing).
It is not the "I" doing the processing. It would be incapable of such a thing, it would be like doing a heart operation on yourself. But the "I" can feel vibrations of the process happening, when it's going strong.

I don't mean to assert that this is the only reason there can be for depression or anxiety. For all I know, there may be dozens. But it's also possible that none of those would be enough on their own without there being an ego in the process of being undone. These are very hazy areas, yet.

A manifesto

Please read this manifesto which I wrote for artists in 1992. It's rather amazing to me how well it still fits my core beliefs after all my subsequent learning. I believe it was written wholly "guided".

Truth and freedom

The truth may set you free, but first it's going to piss you off.
- attributed to Gloria Steinem

Hate and Fear, how they relate

I think I've made a philosophical breakthrough, for me at least.

I was scanning for areas I feel emotional about to "deflate" them.
I came upon "Hate".
Immediately of course I thought I felt hate. But no, it was about the way I was feeling *about* hate.

I felt it was the most dangerous thing anywhere. The worst thing wrong with the Universe.
I asked myself how I would represent hate visually, and saw a floating, flying thing of white-hot and poisonous razor-sharp spikes, which might move super-fast and unpredictably. Scary stuff. :-)

I then thought how would I then represent Fear visually? And I saw a deeply frozen wasteland, like central Antarctica. No life, deeply frozen. Real fear is *frozen*. Paralyzed.

And I realized that Hate is Deep Fear which is only trying to reach out, to fix things! It feels something is deeply wrong, and it trying to find and destroy the thing which is wrong.

It is so frozen and in pain that it is deeply irrational, but Hate is really a huge step *up* from Deep Fear. It is the beginnings of some kind of action, an attempt to reach out. An attempt to fix things.
From outside it seems very destructive, but if you think about it, it really is very, very brave.

A super-concentrated crash course

This is from a letter I just wrote to a friend:

It started with me (Eolake) saying:
I've been doing a LOT of work in recent years with various methods regarding not getting over-emotional, because it leads to depression, anxiety, overwhelm...
And recently, all that work is really starting to pay off. I'm calmer and happier generally, and I almost never get depression or anxiety attacks anymore. It's amazing.

AB:
Awesome! Is it the EFT?

Eolake:
That was one thing, but I have used so many things. I find what one must do as one progresses upwards gets softer and gentler and less active, over the years. At really advanced levels one often really does not need to do anything, except observe non-judgmentally and relaxedly, and then conditions change.

I think one of the most important common denominators is learning to let energy and emotions flow (flow away, or "melt"), instead of being blocked or frozen. It's not done overnight, because we are almost all sitting in thousands of layers of old, hard-packed energy, and one can only handle one layer at a time.

AB:
I STILL haven't taken the time to look at EFT! I should listen when opportunities come to improve myself. And...WHO would I ask, right?!

Eolake:
I think everybody has an inner all-knowing teacher. I call it Intuition, some call it Jesus, some call it Holy Spirit, some Krishna, some Higher Self...
For some people it will seem to come more from outside, and for others, more from inside.
Learning to distinguish between the right Guiding Voice and other voices/influences is not always as easy as it sounds, and make take some learning in itself.

It seems one of our great learning paths in life is learning to let this universal force "take the wheel", and let our human egos take a back seat. The Ego hates not being in control, so it's quite a journey to learn this, but the payoffs are great, since the ego was never really in control anyway.

So. Until and if I ever write a book, this was the super-concentrated wisdom of stobblehouse. Keep it. :-)

... Well, just to throw in another mountain of learning here, another vital bit is to learn that everything Outside ourselves is a reflection of our Inner. So another long learning path is to bit by bit not blame others, or circumstances, but look inside for the Cause.

Update: One application of this I often have had much struggle applying myself, but it can be really helpful: if something really upsets you about something or somebody else, look inside you for something similar. Sometimes the similarity can be very vague, but it'll be there.
For example, Bill gets very upset when he hears somebody killed a dog. Looking inside, he discovers that he always hated dogs and tend to push them aside with his foot. See, nothing to censor really, but this is the real source of his upset, no matter what happens i The World. What upsets you in the world is a reflection, no matter how distorted, of things you'll find inside yourself.

Update: ...
But that's another lesson I'm learning slowly:
Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be.

The universe knows what it's doing. By trying to run it, even just emotionally, I'm just wearing down my health unnecessarily.

Update:
Eolake:
For some people guidance will seem to come more from outside, and for others, more from inside.

AB:
...someone who is able to look at my situation from a distance and give me guidance that I had not asked for. Would that be an example of "outside"?

Eolake:
It may well be. Often is, I'm sure.

Also some people will have conversations with Jesus or a Guardian Angel or what have you. Some might hear words, for others it will be very abstract or conceptual.

I've had a few occasions where an answer seemed to come from such a place, but generally I'm too "macho" to accept such a position. :-)

I will sometimes lean back, try and clear my head of clutter, emotions, attachments and personal desires, and ask The Universe, "what is the best choice for The Whole", and there will always be an *instant* answer, as an idea in my head. If it's not instant, I don't trust the Source. (Sometimes I'll not like the answer, but then I say to myself, if you didn't want an answer, why did you ask?)

----
Now we are picking at the foundations of the most fundamental problems in the Universe, so one is not to expect a short and easy journey! :-)

Meaninglessness

I think one of the important lines in The Disappearance Of The Universe (a book chock-full of important lines) is when J speaks to Gary and tells him that the world must become meaningless to him.

Because 1) it is exactly what must happen to become free of it. (because it's the only correct evaluation of something which does not exist.) 2) emotionally it translates to not caring, and it's so difficult to change caring. And 3) It's a sin.

DU/ACIM is almost diametrically opposed to so much we believe as humans. One of the things is that it's a crime and a sin not to care.
"Dave died."
"I don't care."
"What? You motherf***ing asshole, what do..." blah blah blah.

But worse than judgement from others, we censor and condemn ourselves when we don't care. To be human is to care, and to be human is surely the most important thing in the world?? (Wow, what a perfect trap. The most important thing in the world is to be the very thing which entraps you!)

But I can feel caring about thousands of things flowing away from me the tide. A relief.

Update:
Often the world seems to have such beauty and love. But the thing is that the beauty of Source (life) "seeps in" through the cracks. Or it's reflected in the things in the World. And while we're on the human levels, we confuse it with the things it's reflected in.
But it's while following this "crumb trail" of reflected light that in the end we are let out of the woods and home.

Skellington

"You would maintain, and think it true, that you do not believe these senseless laws, nor act upon them. And when you look at what they say, they cannot be believed. Brother, you do believe them. For how else could you perceive the form they take, with content such as this? Can any form of this be tenable? Yet you believe them for the form they take, and do not recognize the content. It never changes. Can you paint rosy lips upon a skeleton, dress it in loveliness, pet it and pamper it, and make it live? And can you be content with an illusion that you are living?

There is no life outside of Heaven. Where God created life, there life must be. In any state apart from Heaven life is illusion. At best it seems like life; at worst, like death. Yet both are judgments on what is not life, equal in their inaccuracy and lack of meaning. Life not in Heaven is impossible, and what is not in Heaven is not anywhere."

- A Course In Miracles

Stay calm

This seems to be something I have to learn many times:
Unpleasant emotional states (for example depression or anxiety) comes on the heels of strong excitement, either negative or positive. Strong emotions, tension.
If I could learn better to stay calm, I could avoid by far most of it.

It's tough to learn, because I'm excitable, and so far as I can see, the Ego *loves* excitement, as far as it's concerned it is what life is all about.

But I have learned I can do a great deal of keeping calm and calming down on purpose, I just need to become better at staying *aware* of it.

Update below: my friend Laurie expands this into the metaphysical realm, saving me from having posted off-topic. :-)

"That excitement feels like LIFE, it's hard to see it again and again as a dangling carrot, as in fact, a scam. Because it never delivers, it never ends up in LIFE, only loss and further desire.

Also, the mind conjures up scenes of the opposite happening to us if we stop feeding that excitement: dull, dead, personality-less, lifeless.

But desiring any object through the senses, for me without fail has led to disappointment. I'm really tired of it."

(Back to me.) She's right. What's basically wrong with excitement is that it's excitement about a thing in the world. Which isn't there. It's absolutely nothing. How can that not disappoint?

We are so slow that we never learn until our last lifetime. ("It's always in the last place you look.")
"Now I'm a millionaire, but I'm not happy. But I'll bet if I had a hundred million, I'd be happy."
"I'm with the beautiful Mimi Rogers, but I'm not happy. But I bet if I were with the beautiful Nicole Kidman, I'd be happy. ... Nope, still not. But I'll bet if I were with the beautiful Katie Holmes, I'd be happy..."

Gustav Meyrink

"Man is firmly convinced that he is awake; in reality he is caught in a net of sleep and dreams which he has unconsciously woven himself. The tighter the net, the heavier he sleeps. Those who are trapped in its meshes are the sleepers who walk through life like cattle being led to the slaughterhouse, indifferent and without a thought in their heads. Seen through the meshes, the world appears to the dreamers like a piece of lattice-work: they only see misleading apertures, act accordingly, and are unaware that what they see are simply the debris of an enormous whole. These dreamers are not, as you may perhaps think, dwellers in a world of fantasy and poets. They are the everyday men, the workers, the restless ones, consumed by a mad desire for restlessness. They are like those beetles which laboriously climb all the way up along a pipe, only to plunge down into it again as soon as they have reached the top. They say they are awake, but what they think life is, is really only a dream, every detail of which is fixed in advance and independent of their free will."
- The Green Face, by Gustav Meyrink, 1916

Wilde

Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
-- Oscar Wilde

Why breathing is important

I've gained some intuitive understanding of the importance of free-flowing breathing.
Somehow, for some reason, breathing is a very important symbol for BEING. Just being there. Being *aware*. Relaxedly.

I find that when I stop breathing it seems to be mainly when I'm *holding on* to something (a thought, a feeling, a position, what do I know). And *holding on* is one of the main barriers to freedom. When we hold on, energy stops. And the energy stacks up and packs up, and become old and hard. And then we have a vicious cycle, it's very hard to start breathing free and to *let energy flow* when you're sitting in a thick, hard, complex shell of old energy.

The good news is it can be done, and it gets easier over time. And on the day when you have dissolved the last of the old hard-packed energy, you're free and basically invulnerable.

Note: I don't think, like some say, that "if we just learn to breathe correctly", then most of our problems are solved magically. I just think that monitoring your breath (especially at rest in a darkened, quiet room) is an excellent way to find the trouble spots in your energy fields, and start to let them flow.

------
Update: Carol Howe, counselor, adds this:
The reason we learn early on not to breathe is that it cuts off our experience of pain. Watch a baby or toddler who is scared or hurt hold the breath. It becomes habitual.
Then the cartilage between the ribs begins to get "glued" in place and you can't take a really deep breath if you want to because your ribs, and thus lungs, can't expand fully. Deep tissue massage therapy is great for getting "unstuck" physically, which leads to an emotional release. It's quite a process.
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Writing

I am not posting so often here recently. It is not because I'm distracted from my spiritual path. Au contraire, it's I'm distracted from the theoretical bits by the practical bits. In recent months I'm having more spiritual progress than ever, it's quite exciting. But most of it the kind of thing that's too subjective to write about easily. (And also it's quite exhausting, frankly, so non-essential chores have floated a bit.)

Maybe one day I'll write a book, if it's indicated.