SOME THINGS JUST TAKE TIME

SOME THINGS JUST TAKE TIME

Well, in this realm of the senses, they do. In the world we now exist, the idea of time has been created to mark off the distance between perceived beginning and ending points into more or less equal parts. I’m thinking of the time between sunrise and sunset -- the time between one revolution of the earth and the next, the time between one circuit around our sun and the next.

Time is an idea we have adopted to help us manage living in this plane. And look at the plethora of instruments we’ve invented to keep track of these imaginary markers! Look at our dependence on them, and the authority we give them over our lives! We even pay king's ransoms for certain of these "timepieces", when all they do is mark "time". A cheap watch from your local mall does just as well.

But if we take a few steps back and see our existence in the space of infinity, time becomes irrelevant. In Infinity there is no beginning, and no ending. There are no marker points to measure off from or to.

Time is an appearance; a fiction. Time is useful, up to a point. Until we realise that it doesn’t exist.

Then where are we?

Where we always have been -- in Eternity.

There is a misconception widely abroad that Eternity is waiting some time in the future. Not so. Eternity is -- where it has always been and will always be -- here and now.

All we have is NOW.

How long is a “now” moment? No time at all. Now is eternal; it never ends.

“I” would like to spend more time here/now, in no time at all. Trouble is, “I” starts to think about it and – bang – “I” is out of now.

The good news is that the Not-I never leaves the Now. “That-which-I-truly-am” and “now” are one, and remain so regardless of what else is going on. All we have to do is remember that.

“Oh, my God, what time is it?”

Now.

WHAT'S THE MATTER?

Everything matters.

Nothing matters.

Both are true. It depends on your point of view.

Now we find that even what is termed "gross matter" is just an illusion -- particles of organised thought that stand still long enough for me to notice them, then go on their merry way being nothing to me, and something else to somebody else.

Nothing matters.

So what's the matter?

WITHOLDING OUR WELLBEING

Some people spread happiness wherever they go; others spread happiness whenever they go.

Oscar Wilde

Is there such a thing as “evil” in the world?

Yes, there is. I didn’t say if it was good or bad, right or wrong, but is there “evil”?

Yes. It is evil to withhold our wellbeing. It is the denial of Life itself. “Evil” is “Live” in reverse.

Withholding your wellbeing is like driving down the highway in low gear, engine revving, with your head stuck in the rear-view mirror and the handbrake full on. No wonder you get a rough ride!

Why do you do that?

To manipulate, dominate and control someone or something.

But how much cheese is it getting you?

It was 10 am and I was driving to location for a day’s shooting on a children’s TV series, cutting it fine for time. Driving along the busy Esplanade skirting the Perth CBD, the less-than-healthy vehicle I was driving started to play up: the battery stopped charging, the water temperature gauge shot right off the end, and some terrible noises emanated from under the bonnet.

Now, one of the things I have not “got” is motor cars. What I don’t know about cars would fill a mechanics manual. I was immediately gripped by long-familiar feelings of Fear and Inadequacy ….. Fear because I’m running late and there is nowhere on this busy arterial road to stop, and Inadequacy because I don’t know the first thing about motors. Up ahead, the traffic lights suddenly turned as red as my face, and then I started to really panic: I’m now stuck in a long carpark with no chance of making it to a side turnoff.

I pulled up, then suddenly remembered something I’d heard Colin Hayes say many times over – “We withhold our wellbeing to try to manipulate, dominate and control a situation.” I got it – I saw the joke! And the joke was ME! Getting into a stew of Fear and Inadequacy wasn’t helping one little bit. Whether the car made it to location in time and in one piece was now entirely out of my hands; it either would or it would not. I was making myself feel Fearful and Inadequate to manipulate, dominate and control a clapped-out LandRover!! The Landy was supposed to think “Oh, poor Barrie; he doesn’t know anything about motor cars. I’d better get him to location on time!”

Absurd? Of course it is. But don’t we do this kind of absurdity all the time? Fear and Inadequacy are my favourites – I’m addicted to them. What are your addictions? What are the negative emotions you turn to by default in any situation you’re not happy with?

Imagine -- you have a row with your partner over breakfast. You leave for work and get caught up in the day’s events and you forget all about the row. You’re going great! Come knockoff time, you get in your car, drive home, park the car, walk to the front door, and with your hand on the doorknob you suddenly remember the row you had that morning. You change instantly from Mr. Hyde to Dr. Jekyll, a shrivelled prune of anger and righteousness. Why?

To manipulate, dominate and control your partner.

How well does that work for you? Not much? Why do it then? Because, once upon a time, it DID work, or at least you thought it did …………..

You were lying in your crib, a tiny baby. You had become aware of your body and physical feelings of hunger, thirst and wind and nappy discomfort. You were not yet conscious of this awareness because you did not yet have language for it. But you were aware that you had certain physical needs that had to be met, and that you could not meet them for yourself. You were aware that you needed these people you later came to know as Mum and Dad to supply them for you. One day these people were not right there when one of your needs arose. A thought popped which, if you’d had language at the time, might have been something like “Oh, shit! What happens if they’ve left me and don’t come back?” A feeling of insecurity we’ll call Anxiety quickly followed the thought, and you started to grizzle a bit. Mum, who had been waiting for you to wake up, came into your room and the emergency was over. Bingo! Cheese!

The next time this thought popped and Anxiety followed, you grizzled. Bingo! There she appeared. One time, however, Mum was out hanging wet nappies on the line. When you grizzled and felt anxious, nothing happened. The feeling of insecurity intensified, so you started to cry. Suddenly, there she was, come to see what was wrong with you. It worked! Bingo – cheese! So next time you felt hungry or thirsty or uncomfortable, you cut the preliminaries and went straight to feeling anxiety and putting on a bit of a turn. Hey presto – Mum or Dad appeared. Attention! Cheese!

After a while, however, Mum and Dad got to know your grizzles and wails, and which ones were real and which were bunged on. For the most part they stopped responding as quickly as you liked. Now it is important to realise that every one of your turns was classified by your mind as “Essential to My Survival” – (THEY STILL ARE!!) So you started getting into your insecurity feelings and poured it on, powered by your feelings of anxiety, worry, annoyance, fear, outrage, panic……. And sometimes it seemed to get you what you wanted – attention.

But, even when you got it, did the attention bring you lasting happiness?

I’ll say it again because it’s really important that you get this – Every cause of discomfort to your mind is classified by it as a threat to Survival. Your Mind cannot differentiate between a real and present threat, and a perceived threat from the past: it reacts in exactly the same way and with the same intensity. You are wired up like a stimulus/response robot. This is most important if you are to have some compassion for yourself, and in this respect you need all the compassion you can give yourself.

In the very first instance this removing of wellbeing and getting into suffering was real, but it soon became largely all an act to get the attention your Survive-Above-All-Else mind told you that you had to have. But after a while of that, you had done the act so often that you forgot this denial of wellbeing was just an act and you once again took it to be for real. In other words, you no longer had these thoughts and feelings – they had you, and they've been leading you on a most un-merry dance ever since!!

Now of course, most of us no longer need someone else to feed us and wipe our bottoms. But because the human mind is what it is, whenever we feel our security being threatened we react more or less as we did back then in the cradle. We may have learnt in the interim to suppress the raw feelings, or disguise them as something else more benign; we may have learnt from our primary caregivers sneaky, more sophisticated strategies for getting our way, but at the bottom of all our suffering is a deliberate (if unconscious) withholding of our wellbeing in order to manipulate someone or something else into giving us what we want, when we want it, the way we want it.....Give me what I want, or I'll suffer, and it will be all your fault!..... Unfortunately it rarely works to our satisfaction, and even when it does get us what we think we want, we’re not satisfied because we know we manipulated in order to get it. The cheese was removed from that tunnel long ago, but we keep going down there as if we have no choice.

This is the essence of the Third Tunnel – addictively returning to outmoded, ineffective strategies when our equilibrium is threatened or our addictions to particular sensations are not fulfilled. Isn’t that a good definition of insanity? Most of the time we are not aware of the fact that we’re doing it (or It is doing us, actually – It being the default condition we’ve created for ourselves), and because just about everyone else is doing It, too, we don’t see anything very odd about it. It’s almost as if there’s a tacit agreement between us that, although our strategies for improving our lives are not working, we’ll tell ourselves and each other that they ARE, and go on bumping, spluttering, belching and lurching through each day in the vain hope that the cheese will be down here somewhere (maybe when we die and go to Heaven!)

We’re told, especially by priests and politicians, that this is the way life is meant to be, and if we’re really good and don’t complain too much, there is another life waiting for us if we just follow the Instructions, and a very much worse one if we don’t!

And when we meet some authentic spirit who is direct, free of pretence, open and without guile, we feel mightily uncomfortable and even threatened in their presence, especially when they don’t react as they “should” to our manipulative games.

What is it that is so threatening about freedom of spirit? Why do so few people choose to be free?

To withhold your wellbeing is silly; to withhold your grandness is tragic.

What negative feelings keep you in bondage? What positive feelings are you so addicted to that you’ll sell out on your integrity and freedom to get them?

Every feeling you want is available to you, without selling yourself out.

GETTING AUTHENTIC

A couple of days ago. I was in two quite distinct minds about an issue at work that involved most of the staff, and I had to make a decision that could not please everyone. I called a meeting with one of my colleagues and another manager. I knew my colleague's position; it was quite unequivocal.
The other manager, as it turned out, took the opposite view. Suddenly and silently my colleague did a 180 degree U-turn under the table and came up beside her. I wasn't surprised; he is her boyfriend.

*************

A master was meditating one evening when a stranger entered his house, demanding the solid-gold begging bowl that had been given him by the king in gratitude for his sage advice.

The master asked “Why do you need it?” “I don’t,” replied the stranger, “but I am a robber – the best in the land. It is what I do.” He was expecting a lecture on the evils of thievery, but the master said to him simply, “I see. Well, keep stealing, but be aware,” and returned to his meditation.

Some nights later, the stranger again burst into his home, livid with frustration. “You have messed up my life!” he roared. “Last night I broke into the king’s chamber. There before me lay all the riches of the treasury. I reached out to touch some of it and your words came back to me – ‘Keep stealing, but Be Aware’. I froze. I couldn’t go through with it. I am no longer a thief!”

Oh, how we steal from ourselves on a daily basis!

Keep stealing, but become aware.
Thank you Colin Hayes

Let’s look at the basic assumption that you are a fundamentally nice person – a genuine, truthful, valid, authorised, reliable and trustworthy person. I’m not insinuating that you’re not, I’m simply inviting you to question your own assumption that you are. If you continue to assume what you’ve always assumed, nothing is going to change.

Here’s a question for you –

How do you know when you’re lying, if you’re a habitual liar and don’t know it?

You’d swear sincerely that you are honest. But what if you’re mistaken about that?

How can you test your assumptions (in this case about your authenticity)? By doing something you’ve probably never done before – by assuming for a while that, as a human being, you are often NOT authentic, possibly more often than you realise. Change your point of view, and then notice everything that comes up for you while you’re standing in that different perspective.

What’s the point of challenging your assumption of authenticity? Well, apart from the considerable entertainment value, it is fundamentally futile to work on your relationships, your health, your finances, your career, or just about anything else of yours if you are unconsciously duplicitous and deceitful, and deceiving yourself about that too.

Just as an experiment, sit in this possibility for a while -- a helluva lot of what we’re up to each day is about looking good, to others and ourselves. We don’t really mean a lot of the “polite” things we say automatically (e.g. “How are you?”, or “Have a nice day.”) and sometimes we know we don’t mean it. We don’t always believe the things we say we believe in, and we know that. Sometimes we switch to a diametrically opposite opinion in public in order to “get along”. We regularly swap around our hierarchy of values to suit the occasion and the company we’re in at the time, excusing our duplicity to ourselves with the tag of Pragmatism. We apologise without feeling at all apologetic. We go out of our way to be “nice” to people we really don’t like, because we want their approval. We make promises we know we may not deliver on, kidding ourselves that feeling guilty about it afterwards will be enough recompense. We’re afraid to express our fears, doubts and misgivings for fear of not looking strong. We withhold a truth for fear of hurting another person’s feelings. And so it goes on…………… We are so inured to being disloyal to ourselves that we hardly notice it any more, and when we do, we tell ourselves that “It doesn’t matter. It’s trivial. It’s not hurting anyone.”

It is, you know – it’s hurting you.

If you are inauthentic about your disloyalties to yourself, don’t be surprised when others are disloyal to you. In fact, be surprised if they’re not, sooner or later. Inauthenticity attracts inauthenticity. If you cannot cop to your dishonesties, you are a pushover for anyone else who can get at you through the bits you won’t look at. How else do you think our kids learn so early where, when and how to push their parents’ “hot” buttons? How do con-men find their victims so easily? By Implicit Invitation. It’s almost like we wear a neon sign over our head saying “Dishonest, vulnerable Victim here: come and get it!”

And if you want something from someone, you are totally at their mercy. All they have to do is look as if they might withdraw their approval from you, and you will flip over faster than a politician’s promise.

At a deeper level, our inauthenticity is the root cause of our insecurity, and all the separating emotions that emanate from that. If we were totally authentic, we would no longer feel vulnerable.

How are duplicity, disloyalty to yourself and inauthenticity possible? How did they come about?

THE ILLUSION OF DUALITY

We talk often about the importance of “being true to ourselves”. How can you be true to yourself if there is only one of “you”? How can you talk to yourself if there is only one of you? Who is talking; who is listening? How can you deceive yourself if there is only one of you?

We live in a dual-verse, a sub-section of the uni-verse. Everything has its opposite. Everything we claim we “are” has its opposite in us. To the extent that an opposite remains unacknowledged or disallowed, we are affected by it without our knowing it.

I strongly suggest that you look at that last paragraph again, put this down, and just BE with that for a while. Let it be.

The Law of Opposites is a Law of Life. Like another Law of Life, the Law of Gravity, it doesn’t give a hoot whether you believe it or not -- it just IS. Like gravity, when you are aware of its existence, it can be very useful to you, e.g. it keeps you grounded: but if you don’t know about it or fail to take it into account, it can do you a lot of damage, e.g. if you’re up a ladder and lean out too far, the ground comes up relentlessly hard and fast!

Have you ever experienced someone you thought you knew really well suddenly do something quite “out of character”? Of course you have. The only reason you could be taken by surprise, is that you have not heard of, or you’ve forgotten the duality/duplicity of human nature. The same applies to you. Have you ever broken a promise? Of course you have. How come? Because the bit of you that broke the promise has said “I didn’t have the microphone when you promised that one!”

I call this aspect of myself “I/Me Pty. Ltd.”

We used to play a game in Inward Adventure called the I/Me Statue Game. Anne Ameling would call out the word “I”, and we would feel into that and assume for ourselves a posture that expressed that feeling. Then she would call out the word “Me”, and we would feel into that and assume another posture that expressed that feeling. So the game went on for 15-20 minutes, alternating between “I” and “Me”, enabling each of us to get a first-hand experience of the difference between the two entities. You might like to try it for yourself now. Go on, give yourself a treat.

The Law of Duality has its good uses. Duality is an illusion that enables us stand outside of our self and look at who we are. Duality enables us to look at ourselves in a mirror image. If you really don’t know what unacknowledged parts of you remain undiscovered, look at the qualities of those people who show up in your face and whom you judge as “bad”, or “good”. Those qualities exist in you: they must, otherwise you could not recognise them. You are looking at yourself. Those people are mirroring something for you that you need to see about yourself. How neat is that? Be grateful to them.

When you acknowledge and say “Yes” to your duality, and the duality of everyone around you, you are more likely to see things as they are, and less likely to be vulnerable to surprise attack

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