Death; ITS&FYD.ch1,pt14.

DEATH

[Please see the Introduction posted March 2013]

Death is of course, not the end; we continue to continue. But, the internal split also continues; it can only be healed during life/incarnation. I suspect that the split at death is between the spirit and the soul, rather than NOVAK’s (which see) argument that it is between the conscious and unconscious which is split during life, but that is academic for the practical purposes of this UUS.

The ‘judgement/assessing’ of the Bible appears to be our chance to assess how we have done in this life, but we can choose to avoid that too. There are too many people who have said ‘my life ran before my eyes’ as they thought they were going to die, as well as the number of people who have had NDE’s to think otherwise. ‘Assessing’ is the business of facing ourselves, and that can be a very uncomfortable process indeed, such that many will not do it; this time. Notice here that the person doing the assessing is not God, or the church or anyone else but you; you are the one that carries the memories. We don’t even like this one; it implies that if someone does not feel guilty, they won’t even feel the blame, which is correct in that they may not; but the mirror laws are always there, whether we know it or not.

Through reincarnation we carry whatever our decisions about Life may be along with us to the next life, where we will receive feedback about these decisions, and so we continue on and on.

We are ‘dust’ = earth.

There’s a lot about ‘dust’ in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; ‘Dust we are, and dust we shall become’.

This was part of God’s ‘cursings’ in the story, so we consider this a curse, but we forget that God is not going to curse anyone; what for, if She needs nothing from us?. But we are made of earth, and I suspect that there is something inherently powerful in that, even if the ‘powerful’ is only for our own purposes, and, I don’t actually know what that ‘power’ might be, except to guess that it is by coming back to our own bodies and to just exactly who we are and what we have and what we can do, that makes us ‘powerful’. The instruction may well include considering that we will die sometime, so we need to consider/remember that we are mortal; life is fleeting etc, etc.

It is also true that the more you are able to connect directly to Earth, the more you will be able to draw energy from the Earth. You may be able to notice that as you do so, Earth considers that you are good enough for her, as is true for all creations made from earth. How could she think otherwise? If you feel ‘good enough’ you can feel safe; the safety that comes from not being judged or compared. This is a pretty good feeling.

Death follows life as night follows day. It is not only our chance to rest and take time out, but also to ‘start over’ and tackle it all again. But, ultimately we need it to inform life.

By informing life, I mean asking the ‘death questions’, some of which are…

‘What would you do today if….

..You were to die tomorrow?

..You were to die within 3 to 6 months?

..You became ill and only had x months to live; and so on?

I spend more time on these in the goal-setting chapter.

These types of questions help you to work out what is important to you, and what you want and what you can do about it. That is why we ask them. They inform you about your life. Who are you, and what would you change? The pressure here is on you to ask, especially about what you value the most, and usually that’s relationships and love. But, notice too, that all of these questions are about you having to ‘go inside’ and ask your InSelf for the answers.

We fear it; it is the end of what we know, (as well as the potential for the assessing which can actually feel worse). On the other hand, many people don’t know why they are alive and are not that interested either, so they don’t really care either way. Life has a habit of trying to make/help them care, even if it is a solid ‘whack around the ear-holes’ and sometimes it is just that, especially if we will not take any notice any other way.

In the end, the person you get to face is your real Self which is hidden within the InSelf. It is that unknown ‘other’ (have I said this before?). We would like to run from our fears or we try to block them as much as possible. But, there is no way out, only through. We get to face our fears and we do that by understanding that everyone fears their fears as we fear terrible dragons. The question is when, not if we face them.

Facing ourselves = facing our own dragons. 

Our society has many myths and tales about horrible dragons breathing fire, who sit on a great pile of treasure and defend it. And of heroes who fight these dragons and become owners of this treasure and thus able to win great things in life.

These ‘dragons’ are your fears and guilt and shame because that is exactly what they feel like. Facing them is what fighting the dragons is about. They are very frightening, and awful. They are terribly strong, tricky and agile; they breathe fire and can burn us and even kill us, and want to. They must be treated with the deepest respect for their powers to kill us, because they can.

You must armour yourself with your resources and check that these resources are in working order first. This means finding out what these resources actually are and practicing on something very small or ‘fake’ first, and work up. Think of knights practicing with jousting posts and wooden swords and finding and developing their own strengths first.

There may be several jousts as you try to battle the dragon and you learn what the dragon can do, but when you win and the dragon is dead, you get the treasure, and become ‘wealthy’. You have been heroic, and will feel stronger internally and be able to tackle more dragons if needs be. The internal ‘wealth’ is the Insights.

There is truly nothing more heroic than facing and killing your own dragons, and the ‘treasure’ is immense, and there is always ‘treasure’. We will deeply ‘treasure’ what we find when we kill the dragon and inspect what was underneath it.

This UUS includes a useful method for tackling many of them, but not all. Some of them do need 2 people, and are thus not DIY; you will have to have help for them. I discuss this in Trauma (which see).

Death and Life.

We tend to think of death as the opposite of life, but it actually isn’t; it is part of life, and in fact, it is our greatest ally in learning to live correctly for ourselves.

The opposite of life is un-life. It comes about through un-love. But another opposite can be non-life.

So, what do we think life is? If we were truly alive, what would we be? We might be what…?

And here’s a list of opposites (again). Once again, as always, the concept and its opposite are on the same line. And, once again, you may like to add your own concepts…

About building a list of contrasts.

A list of contrasts builds a ‘picture’ or a ‘feeling’ (depending on how we take in information). Notice that each word is a separate concept or Modality that we use to build up these pictures, with the more modalities making a more compelling and specific/particular picture/definition. Some of the modalities used here are colour, brightness, movement, temperature, and so on. The ‘opposites’ are not necessarily fixed in that your opposites may be different from mine.

But the point here is that increasing the number of modalities builds the picture increasingly clearly.

LIFE               vs.                   NON-LIFE = ‘Ghost’

Vital                                        Sluggish, still

Colourful                                 Grey, colourless

Giving                                      Wanting

Warm                                      Cold

Expressive                             Dumb, silent

Creative                                 Consuming

Trusting                                  Fearful

Having                                    Taking

Relating                                  Alone

‘Present’, Real                       Invisible, unseen

Happy                                     Sad

‘Fed’                                       Hungry

Effective                                 Impotent

Passion                                  Boredom

Free                                        Trapped, stuck

Etc.                                         Etc.

My argument here is that an opposite of life is the ghost, and that makes us really fearful, and rightly so. And yet, it is far more likely to creep into our lives when we refuse to ask the ‘death questions’.

[Children know all about ‘the ghost’; any attention being indeed better than none.]

Cynicism.

I also think that we need to beware of cynicism, which tends to build as we have trouble believing in what we are told to believe. We kind of end up in a limbo land of can’t believe what we’re ‘supposed to believe’ and can’t work out what might be useful to us to believe (and make sense too?). It seems so self-indulgent to look for or well, actually find a belief system that keeps us happy, but what use is your unhappiness, to yourself or to others? Were you wanting to spread it around? Cynicism makes us sad ‘at bottom’ which brings in the ‘greyness’, and really, it’s the greyness that can be a useful warning that we might be heading in the wrong direction.

Where else might ‘greyness’ be in our lives?

Well, have you looked around at city environments lately? Concrete, steel, glass and bitumen; so little plant material or anything that belongs in nature unless it’s a useful office plant. Lots of coloured lights to cover it up, but it’s still there. We all wear black as we go about our working lives. Modern colours for gymnasiums and many corporate-style meeting places are grey, white and black, with red for luck. Is this what you want in your life? If we dance, it’s by ourselves in the dark with a few lights thrown around, and being deafened. If we sing, it’s others’ music’ in a beat (rock; heavy metal) that kills life, and deafens us with generally sad/angry ‘male’ words about ‘the lost only lerv’.

So, the upshot?

I think the upshot of this is that there are some really scary things that can happen to us when we will not submit, ‘turn around’, face ourselves, and use life to learn about who we are inside. They are not punishments per se, or even threats, but they are the consequences of energy laws that extend from love to un-love; life to un-life.

It is not easy, we don’t like it, and don’t want to do it, but getting to be partners with God is what we need and want to do, and we truly love it when we ‘get’ that, and there’s more. There’s always more. The Universe expands all the time; (apparently even the earth is expanding).

Life is Fierce.

It really is. The Mirror Laws are fierce in terms of ‘watch out’; even Being at Choice is fierce. It’s up to you. Life can give us some awful whacks if we won’t ‘wake up’. It seems to be really hard and mean to even say this. We actually like the idea of staying as a child, but we mustn’t and we can’t. All we have to do is look at and watch animal behaviour in the wild, but we can’t do it without judging. We refuse to look at this. We want life to be all nice and ‘lovey-dovey’ and our way and get very cross and sorry for ourselves when it isn’t.

This does not mean you need to hide under a rock, or be afraid or avoid the natural world, but it does mean be careful, observant, awake, and use all your senses, including your intuition, as you explore life. Animals get to do it all the time.

Finding our own power for ourselves as we head toward being a full Adult; (it’s a kind of ‘powerless power’ in a strange way because it is not a ‘power over’ anyone); is immensely rewarding.

And that’s what this UUS is saying Life is for.

Facing death and submitting to the information that Life brings to us is the way through (it’s not out). It’s not if; it’s when. When will you stand and Look; now or later? As we do so, Life becomes a Present, and we live with our own Purpose which leads to great satisfaction with Self, ie, proper Self-esteem (TSE) and ‘fed’-ness. There is a feeling of great internal Security here; it is the ‘house built on rock’. [As well as that ‘Rest in Peace’ bit.]

And now we go on to the next chapter which is about Wanting to be Like God.

Suffering; ITS&FYD.ch1,pt13.

SUFFERING & PAIN

[Please see the Introduction posted March 2013]

BUT BABY, IT’S COLD OUTSIDE.

Introduction.

The greatest problem with trying to discuss suffering is that the ‘causes’ can be internal or external; ie, ‘caused’ by others or self and that these causes are multi-departmental in terms of PEMS; not to mention levels of understanding. We have almost no understanding that much can be faced in life if we have the tools, the help, and the understanding that it is our Spiritual concepts that affect our lives all the way through to our individual physical circumstances. This is both for ourselves as individuals and as part of society.

We absolutely need a proper and respectful set of concepts for TISPing ourselves and Life as a reason to live and to treat ourselves and others with respect. This UUS is attempting to set up just such a set of concepts.

In general our greatest suffering comes out of our lack of real meaning in Life. This is what Jung was talking about. To quote Marie Louise von Franz;

“Jung would never treat a patient in their 2nd half of life without arriving at the question as to the meaning of this person’s life. It made no difference which everyday problem had led to the commencement of treatment; it always came down to this final question. For if one knows that one’s life has a meaning, then one is able to endure it.”

This theme is illustrated in the Tarot card of the 5 of Pentacles where 2 people in poverty and illness struggle along in the snow past the slightly open door of a church (depicted by a church window) without noticing it. What we ‘believe’ or how we find meaning for our life affects us to the core.

This is the primary reason I argue for this UUS. It gives useful meaning and a ‘reason’ for our ‘discomfort’ with Life, and thus helps us face the Split/disconnection within ourselves. This disconnection is what I am talking about when I am saying that essentially we disrespect our selves and our bodies and Life/Nature. Life is perfectly capable of (and does) giving us a great ‘whack’ when we are heading in the wrong direction for ourselves and have not taken sufficient notice of the prior gentler ‘tapping’ that we often receive. Finding this respect is essential. I don’t think we have much time left.

Life has a bad habit of pinning us up against the wall and saying ‘is this what you want?’ I suspect that many people have chosen this current lifetime as a method of pressuring themselves, as these seem to be very pressured times.

We are built to think about any pickle that we are in and to try to ascertain all the factors that got us where we are.

We are built to Explore and Look for what we want. We are also built to be able to ‘back up’ and work out how we got to where we have got; to think and to remember. Antidepressants seem to mess up our ability to do this.

Once we have done that we need to look in the Mirror and check out our own ‘beam in our eye’, and inspect and unravel our own judgement and blame of ‘the other’ to learn about our own InSelf. If we were not so caught up in our pernicious universal judging/blaming and were able to understand our ‘normal’ human-ness and bumbling, we would be far better equipped to help each other sort out our own ‘beams’, before we begin to ‘throw stones’. (A mixed metaphor or so.)

[The trouble here is that the factors in our ‘global environment’ that do greatly affect others’ suffering are now horrendously intertwined and thus appalling to attempt to unravel.]

Sometimes we seem to need to ‘get higher up’ to get out of feeling trapped.

[I once tried to trap a mouse that I found in my pantry using 4 square glass jars that I pushed together, but it popped straight up the tiny gap in the middle and escaped. It had not occurred to me as its potential way out.]

It is suffering that forces us to look for alternatives. It (suffering) is not necessarily required. Although everybody is nominally looking for the same thing (which we tend to refer to as ‘Love’) what we are really looking for is how this love feels inside us because we do not know.

Sometimes the only way to find what we don’t know what we are looking for is to learn to know what it is not.

We feel intrinsically separated from the comfort of heaven.

Being apart from God is painful, and we are deeply afraid and yearn for the safety of being a part.

We deeply fear alone, and run from it.

We are afraid we won’t get back, and we’re full of sin.

This UUS argues that you will get back, and you’ve not been ‘thrown out’ for ‘badness’.

We don’t know why we’re here and it makes no sense; it’s all arbitrary.

This UUS argues that God wants us to embrace Life and learn how to have the fun that She has. She knows it’s not easy, and I suspect She didn’t find it easy either. But, once She had worked it out… well, that was something else, and She wanted to share it. In effect, She wants partners, and we want to get to be partners. And basically, we’ll keep going until we get there, because, as I may have said before, we are parts of God.

To repeat; this UUS provides spiritual support as a reason and method (see later chapters) for facing one’s own problems in the physical, mental and emotional departments of life. It’s a useful way to support one’s self in finding meaning in life and learn how to live it in a manner that is correct for you. It is a reason for Life that also gives choice in every way.

We are supposed to suffer because it makes us ‘good’.

This comes straight out of good old P&C teachings. It’s incorrect simply because you are not considered ‘bad’ in the first place, as I hope to have made plain by now.

And, Suffering is ‘good for us’.

Suffering is not ‘good for us’ per se except to make us think. Its main message is ‘wrong way, go back’.

Thus, we are meant to think (if able to) about and remember…

·      How we got into this situation, taking all factors/forces into account and going back at least 2 years.

·      What were you judging, expecting, or blaming.

·      What is your body actually telling you?

·      Can you turn within?

·      What are the things of the most primary importance to you?

·      Can you find any advantages in this situation?

·      What brings you comfort/solace?

·      What can you learn here?

·      Can you change anything of this?

·      Are you passing this suffering along?

If God loves us, She wouldn’t make us suffer.

Not so, She treats us as powerful for ourselves as She is for Herself, because we are, but it is up to us to find that power. Life includes it all, so that we can explore it all, but our use and mis-use of energy has consequences that we may not understand for a while.

Suffering calls us to look for alternatives and hunt. It is still informative even if it’s ‘wrong way, go back’

How can we believe we are at choice?

Love must give choice, and we want to get to be partners to God. However, believing is not required here. This UUS is entirely one person’s (ie, me) ideas that give/gave me comfort, and that is why I am expressing them. Yours may be much more use to you.

What about the starving Africans? Have they chosen their situation?

I really don’t know. This UUS argues that their situation will serve them eventually, even if I don’t know the details.

Other major causes of suffering are the way power and money are used by powerful companies and countries to play ‘ducks and drakes’ with developing countries in whatever way they wish and these countries cannot do anything about them. Some of the things that rich powerful countries do to poor countries contribute to some of this abuse. Many companies are now bigger than countries and to whom do those people in charge of these companies really answer? Our P&C model of ‘how life is and should be’ (see next chapter) causes immense suffering and powerlessness to many people. Mirror Laws make it plain that if we treat others badly, then we are treating ourselves badly at very deep levels.

We need a different model, and I explore this in the next chapter.

Disrespect for Life and our selves.

Much of our suffering is through our real failure to appreciate the needs of the Soul and thus our bodies.

Our disrespect for Life and others as well, is enormous. We poison our environment (and ourselves) with chemicals, heavy metals and waste and pollution and ignore, absolutely, our bodies’ and Life’s need for clean air, clean water and clean soil, and I mean clean, not just a little bit ‘buggered up’.

This poisoning of our environment and the decreasing ability of our food to nourish us, directly affects our bodies and thus, our health (physical and mental) and gets us into trouble; deep trouble. Are we looking for ways to tackle cleaning up our environment at major comprehensive levels? Some governments are attempting to do so, but at great risk of being booted out of office as it is generally deemed a terrible thing for business which, of course, must come first. We worship money.

And disrespect for the power of God/Life/Self.

Our disrespect for our own need to allow life to inform us of what we need and want to know is directly related to our suffering.

‘Man’ puts himself first above life and attempts to dominate and control the natural world. This is mostly because we fear it and we fear life. If we can’t sort this fear, we can’t really sort anything.

What about ‘really bad’ people?

Sometimes people place themselves in situations which will give them the experience of being at a very great distance from God.

The greater the distance between a part and apart, the more uncomfortable is the process of growing up but the more you will be able to See and the more adult you may be able to become and thus a potential partner to God. That distance is what you have chosen, but it does not mean that it’s going to be a comfortable ride or even that you will succeed in your aims in this life. Remember that you have a great deal of time to do this in, and it can take a great deal of time and different lifetime experiences and perspectives to do it. My own experience is that ‘it all comes out in the wash’ you might say, but that is not to say that it was easy or that there wasn’t plenty of ‘grunge’ to look at.

PS. Judging that people are ‘really bad’ is a call to look in the Mirror, because your judging is making a fear available to your notice, that you may wish to clear.

Another thing that is useful to understand is that when we judge and label another as ‘really bad/terrible’ we have no way of accessing or even recognizing that strong ‘negative’ energy that is apparently ‘out there’ within ourselves, and if we can’t access it, we can’t use it. It’s not available and in fact, it just frightens us, and thus, controls and limits our lives. This is the way our judgements make us afraid.

Trying to Assign Blame.

The problem with trying to understand how we are at choice is the temptation to blame the suffering person as being ‘at choice’ and leave it at that, but as I stated above, this is not a blame system. This is a ‘support the other person, as you may yourself wish to be supported’ system. [Not to mention, there’s still an awful lot of explaining left to do on my part about exactly how one could possibly get to empowering oneself. - see below]

Also, you do not know why something is happening to someone else, or what they may need to See/learn, and they may not know either until further down the track whenever that may be, and it is actually not your business.

So, if someone has ‘chosen’ to suffer in this life do we leave them to it? This is another loaded question because their and our motives are usually very mixed up. Unravelling and sorting out our own motives is an essential part of facing ourselves, and is dealt with in later chapters. A lot of the answer includes who is wanting or expecting help for themselves as well as those who wish to help or are expected to.

My ideal world includes an overall awareness that the ‘weak’ need basic protection and the chance to ‘grow up’, simply because we need to protect the ‘weak’ in our selves (Mirror Laws = ‘the rejected weak out there are the rejected weak inside us’). I address the question of group awareness and action in a later chapter because I feel strongly that a society that has people in it with nothing to lose, is a society that lacks integrity and will therefore be prone to disintegrate.

The Challenge.

We don’t know what we can find out, and we don’t know what our resources can be, so sometimes we challenge ourselves or we want the pressure. Resilience seems to need duress before we know we have it. Diamonds are forged under great pressure.

Consider some examples.

A mild example here could be someone who wanted to check if they could meditate in the noisiest environment that they could find. Another eg is the mystic, Ainslie Meares, who taught himself to really relax by using small controlled burns on his wrists. (awk!) We have internal resources that may only awaken under exigencies. Only someone who has experienced major poverty and/or degradation will galvanize themselves to try to prevent it further down the line or at least have a very strong understanding that it is deeply wrong to allow humans, or animals for that matter, to live in such a way. Someone who has been blind in one life will be far more likely to be extremely interested in finding a way to give sight to others in a later life, and so on.

Someone who has tangled bitterly with the medical world may begin to look for alternatives. Someone who has tangled bitterly with the legal world may learn to be a lawyer in next life, and so on. Someone who has starved may learn to be very careful about food. Someone who has been extremely poor and oppressed may realize that it is better to die fighting for his and others’ rights than to continue to be oppressed. Someone who has lived with secret guilt in one lifetime may decide that death and/or speaking up, maybe both, is possibly a better idea in the next one.

The challenge of suffering is how you are able to achieve the healing you desire.

If you cannot, you may continue to suffer, and many people do, and then the challenge is how you deal with that. Milton Erickson was paralyzed by polio in his late teens, with only his eyes and his mind available to him. He used them to observe people very minutely. He later learnt to walk but always with pain which he dealt with by hypnotising himself. He became simply one of the best therapists of all time. (There is a short biography of Erickson in Wikipedia.) This is inspiring because it reminds us that it can be done. Another example could be the Greek story of the centaur Chiron, who used his unending search for healing for himself to teach others about what he had and had not found. Notice that this search was unending; it did not end in his lifetime.

If you end up simply suffering you will unconsciously want others to suffer too, and will ‘spread it around’.

A primary challenge for many people is how to find ways to maximize what you can do in this situation. You are looking for ways in which to prevent and reverse such things in the first place, for yourself and others, and this is not always possible.

Sometimes we are unable to be healed and sometimes we cannot change the situation either, and may die. And still this is not the end.

Some of these factors/forces are beyond any single person to fix, and some of them are something to be angry about and to fight for. It is also true that some of them are not worth living through. Sometimes it is better to fight for our ideas or to die fighting/protesting than live/survive under vile circumstances/treatment. Some suffering is worse than death.

Sometimes we do not know what we had until we’ve lost it. “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone”. Our and others’ losses can be devastating and teach us to value the fragility of life, and maybe to be grateful while you have these things that are important to you.

Suffering and Pain force 1. Alone and 2. ‘Down to the Bone.

1.Alone.

Suffering forces facing ‘alone’, (as does death, but we don’t always face this). But we fail to notice that God had to face it too! And we and Life are Her answer to this question. What is yours? Who are you when you are alone in the middle of the night? What are your resources? Who is there? This ‘alone’ means externally alone, but you have an ‘other’ within you. You can label this God/Life/Nature/U which is a great comfort if you can turn to Her, or you can label this person your InSelf. This UUS (amongst others) argues they are the same thing. Either way this pans out as ‘you are loved’ even if you may feel ‘unloved’. You don’t actually need anyone else for you to learn to Love your InSelf, and therefore feel loved. God did not, and neither do you; and you can still ask for help.

To repeat, it is possible to learn to Love You by yourself. A method is outlined in this UUS. There are others, but almost always all under the radar of social awareness. Our society prefers Blame.

2. Suffering forces us ‘down to the bone’.

We are ‘hung on the hook and rot’; we are stuck and forced to stop and back up and work out the absolute essentials for ourselves (the ‘bones of it’). The world out there goes on without us. Do then we even exist? Suffering and pain reduces the material world to ‘dust’. It is the great equalizer, (while alive) and we may not like that at all. And yet in facing our essential equality we come closer to our own humanity and our own self. Remember Merge needs equality. Suffering may be the only way we will look and come to it.

Pain can break us, and for others it has made them ‘break open’ in a way. The pain and suffering has made them kinder and wiser; sort of ‘bigger’ in fact. It does seem to be true that pain is the only thing that makes us look at ourselves. If things are OK, we seem to congratulate ourselves or take it for granted and only start to query things if they are not.

Buddha and Desire.

My understanding of Buddhist belief is that Buddha noticed that life on earth was full of suffering, and developed the idea that this was inevitable until a person became ‘enlightened’ and could ‘get off the wheel’ and no longer needed to be incarnated on earth. He also noticed that people wanted what they could not have and received what they did not want, so his answer to this was to consider that desire itself was the problem. Hence it seemed a good idea to eliminate desire altogether; (except to desire to be ‘enlightened’?).

There are 2 problems with these concepts.

1. ‘Getting off the wheel of Life’.

This is another ‘ off-earth’ version of ‘Heaven is where we’re ‘sposed to be’. This UUS posits that Earth is where we’re ‘sposed to be.

2. Getting rid of desire stops suffering.

To me, this is like telling the tiger in the cage that it’s wise not to be a tiger. This is also similar to directives that anger is ‘bad’. Anger is your energy heading in an uncomfortable direction, ie your gut. People who want to be ‘good’ have a terrible time stuffing down desire and anger, especially when other ‘ungood’ people have a great time. (It’s a judgement; what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’?) Desire is a primary drive, as is Explore. No desire, no Life. It is desire that can get us out of the cage and eventually to our own Expression of Self. When our desires get us stuck, the idea is to back up and think about how we got there, and what we’re thinking about it, (judging or expecting), and what can be done about it. It is not the desire that is the problem; it’s the ‘wants’, and specifically our attachment to our ‘wants’. (see also ‘wanting versus having’ in the previous section.) Then be careful about how and what you desire next.

Animals and Suffering.

Animals are not sentient beings, as in, they are unconscious and are not ‘split’, and are already fully expressing their being. The do not need to become conscious of their unconscious as we do - they are their unconscious, and are in fact here to teach us a few things about that. Buddhists have a ‘do not kill’ command as part of their belief structure, but this can and does leave a lot of animals in suffering.

Mirror Laws (ML) make it quite plain that it is wise to avoid causing suffering even inadvertently, or we will need to experience it ourselves. For our own sakes, we need to work to alleviate if not eliminate suffering in others as much as is ‘proper’ for us, starting with cleaning up our own.

Thus, all animals must be…

- Allowed to be themselves and not treated as a commodity; (ML - as we treat animals as a commodity, we treat ourselves as a commodity),

- Protected from suffering and pain as we wish to be protected from suffering and pain, and thus we work to stop it, which includes ‘putting down’ animals that can’t be healed physically, and of course working to prevent unwanted or neglected/sick animals in the first place.

This does not mean, don’t kill animals, especially if the reason for their existence in the first place is that we want to eat them, but it does mean that we need to honour and respect their needs for their own being, as we wish to do the same for ourselves. This means ensuring that they have a life that is correct and enjoyable for them, and that when we do kill them, we do it without any pain or suffering for them, and we do it with gratitude for their gift of their life to us, and use as much of the animal as we can, ie don’t waste it or ‘rubbish’ it.

It also means clean air, water, and soil (for all of us really) and working to avoid and eventually eliminate the use of hormones, vaccines, GMO in their food or anyone else’s, and so on.

Our health and vitality depends on their health and vitality, ditto plants.

Animals as vermin.

For example, foxes, rabbits, cane toads etc.etc. These still need to be killed ‘cleanly’, for your own sake (ML). Neither should we ignore their uses to us while living (their presence in our lives are still information about us), or dead, (it is wise for us not to ‘waste’ their bodies or treat as ‘refuse’). If we handled Nature better and had less ‘monoculture’ thinking, we might have fewer problems, but it is still a difficult area to delineate, because there are so many factors in the way we impinge on Nature and regard her as something we are here to exploit, or defend ourselves against her ‘attacks’. However, the main principal is to avoid inflicting suffering.

Life as an Illusion.

There is nothing illusory about Life on Earth in this UUS. Any perception of it in this way arises from teachings that imply that our ‘proper’ home is off-earth. Such an attitude leads to essentially disrespect of all around you, both life and others, and of course, yourself. How does one love anything in the face of such disrespect? The only place there may be illusion might be in your own decisions and attitude to life, which are being reflected back to you.

‘Ascension’ thinking.

This is another version of ‘off-earth’ ideas, and to me, another version of wishing to escape the difficulties we do not wish to face, as in, our own Shadow within InSelf. These ideas don’t fit in with this UUS.

In sum.

Our patterns and searchings and explorations have a far greater scope than we are normally aware of in this life. However that is not to say that it is not possible to find out what your own patterns and searchings are. There are now tools available to find out. It is possible and can be done. It is worth considering alternatives and hunting/exploring.

Life is God’s great Creation and Expression of Her Self in Her Exploring; and thus Delight and Love of You. It Serves You and Everyone Else All the time at the same time, as Mirror and Guide for your ultimate Delight for your Self and your Expression of this. This is what is truly mind boggling! This is the great ‘perfection’ of life. Hence, awe, gratitude and respect are useful attitudes on your part, and you must respect its power and its information for you, ie, its personal effect on you.

If it is all perfect, how is the un-love of suffering telling you about your own and others’ un-love for your InSelf? What do you want; what is important, and what are the basic basics? My version of the basic basics is this UUS of TISP InSelf. What is yours?

Ultimately the idea is to be able to support ourselves internally regardless of external circumstances and thus be able to have courage in our own lives and be kind to others in theirs. It is a great self-sufficiency in life.

Thus, always and still we are being asked

Who are you in this? And what do you want? Go inside and find out.

In this way we ‘grow up’ and embrace being apart. This means we...

·      differentiate ourselves out by sorting out and refining what we do and don’t want.

·      understand what’s important to us and others while we learn that ‘they is us’.

·      come into partnership with Life and learn how to Create Life from the heart both internally and externally ie ‘do God’.

In this we find our own Self and own that Self.

And we have a lot of time - eternity in fact - to do it.

and Life on Earth has heaps of

Contrasts and

Mirrors and

tonnes of things for us to experience.

to help us heal the split in our psyche.

The upshot of all this.

You cannot know others’ choices or their greater purpose which can span many lives, not just one. Blaming others as ‘deserving it’ is pointless. It is far better to have a society that works out how to help all of its members to have a meaningful participatory life.

As with all of us, the other is also searching and exploring.

It takes Time to understand what we have experienced and it takes Time; lots of it, to understand our own relationship with life.

Life is the gift; the journey is imperative. In the face of eternity, it does not matter one bit how long it takes to get there. Working it out is not easy, but having worked it out is great. On the way, like a worm on the hook, we scream and yell and whinge and hate it. We are afraid and angry. It is cold outside and it is painful and we hope like hell it really is just one life (oh no! it’s not! but it’s too late now!).

And now we turn to Death.

Judgement and Blaming; Choice; ITS&FYD.ch1,pt12.

BLAME & CHOICE

[Please see the Introduction posted March2013]

1st - JUDGEMENT and BLAMING

Judgement and Expectations.

Judgement and expectation are some of what I mean when I talk about ‘useless thinking or concepts about life’.

The axiom “no judgement and no expectations” basically sums it up here.

But, another version of this could be, ‘If everything ‘out there’ has to be OK before you are happy, you’ve got a problem’.

Our society has judgement, blame and victim so built in to it that it is hard to see anything differently at all. Much of this ‘judgement’ comes ‘built-in’ with our single-life religious teachings which are absolutely based on external authority (Power & Control (P&C)) and the judgement of whether we are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, with the consequence that we spend our whole lives deciding whether things are good or bad. But ‘nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so’. Shakespeare said it, and lots of other people say it, and it is part of some non-Western teachings.

It may be hard for us to believe, but God is not judging us. In God’s eyes we’re doing normal human being (= bumble, bumble, fart and stumble). This is not to say that there are no consequences to our actions because we are still learning about the rules of energy. I discuss this in Mirror Laws, which see. Much of what Jesus was implying in the word ‘father’ which is so different today is that God knows that we are children learning about life. We fall down and we pick ourselves up again. “There is no failure, only feedback.”

We judge so much and we are so afraid, so what are we actually doing here?

When we judge, we are actually turning our awareness to the external world, (this is where we are taught from), and we are thinking that we know what good or bad would be.

We are forever turning our awareness to, and focussing on the external world. Our society rarely considers the internal world, but introverts are more aware of it than extroverts.

When we look ‘outside’ to the external world and engage in comparing and contrasting, we’re actually trying to encompass too much and we can’t. It’s too much for us and we can’t comprehend. We try, but we’re like a frog blowing itself up to make itself look bigger and it’s all air, as in, nothing inside, and in so doing we loose sight of our InSelf.

Thinking we know what ‘good’ or ‘bad’ would be.

The trouble is, we don’t; we really don’t. Turning our awareness to the external world and making decisions about it in the absence of actually knowing the future or the longer term affects of whatever, simply dis-empowers us. God doesn’t really know how things are actually going to work out, and neither do we.

This sounds perfectly blasphemous etc, etc, but as I wrote above, God is using the laws of energy and knows how they work and She trusts that it will work out eventually while we find out on the way; we are being given the time to ‘sort it out’ ourselves. She also knows how our minds function, because we’re bits of her, and She has actually tried to warn us about it in the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden (see addendum). ‘Thinking you know’ is ‘eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (=judging)’.

Thinking you know is your making of a decision about ‘out there’. You are judging Life (as the ‘out there’ or ‘the other’).

However, as we judge out there so we are judging ‘in here’; unconsciously of course, but we’re still doing it. It’s a comparison.

If it’s about the other; the worse we think they are, the harder it is for us to access the parts of our inner selves that are like that.

We feel guilt and shame about our ‘bad’ bits and congratulate ourselves and feel superior about our ‘good’ bits. But it leaves us worrying about ‘not good enough’ (NGE), and trying harder to pride ourselves as well as deny the NGE’s.

If it’s an event, we want the supposed ‘good’ by whatever criteria we use and become frightened of the ‘bad’ as potential to happen to us. Insurance ads reinforce this all the time; ‘you’ll get sick, have an accident, etc’.

The upshot of this is fear of what could happen to us and the inability to trust life at all.

This is not to say there is no need to be careful as well as to take out insurance (’in God we trust, but keep your powder dry’) but that it’s actually your judging that makes you feel unsafe and afraid of life, ie fear. Thus, the more you can withdraw any form of judgement about life whatsoever, the safer and actually ‘good enough’ you will come to feel, which translates as a ‘trust’ in life.

Expectation is similar. This is when we are expecting ‘out there’ to conform with our concepts of how things ‘should be’. The ‘should’ is the giveaway. Once again this is a ‘thinking we know’ when we don’t, but this time we cannot be grateful. If we get what we want we take it for granted, and if we don’t we whinge. We want to ‘take’ all the time.

We want out there to be how we think it should be and get very cross/angry/sad when it’s not, as in, we have a whopping snit when Life doesn’t ‘play ball’ and get even crosser when others appear to get ‘good’ things when we don’t.

This is the ‘child’ expecting to take or be given whatever it wants from Life and having a whopping tantrum when it cannot.

They (judgement and expectation) are about your decisions about life out there and thinking you know about what is external to you. You don’t.

Both are a refusal to allow Life to serve you and an attempt at domination on your part and thus, no submission. [Have I said this before?] Life is more powerful than you, but it is there to serve and guide you.

Refusing to allow Life to serve you leads to a waste of your life (’refuse’ is an interesting word) and an inability to love your InSelf.

They are also the basic cause of the ‘Internal Dialogue’, which is that racket/noise in your head that you are so used to that never goes away. This racket is disempowering in many ways, and we also try many things to cover it up or drown it out. ‘Stopping the Internal Dialogue’ is a Toltec goal that is very empowering. I will discuss it in the goal-setting chapter.

An Eastern ‘cure’ (read ‘discipline’) for judging is ‘how am I that?’ (whatever I am judging).

Blame

Blame, whether of others or self is the next step along from judgement and expectation.

Blame is basically sending out anger (an ‘attack thought’) to someone or something, either out there or to our InSelf which is just as bad. We would like to attack and would if we could which means that ‘the other’ is not safe from you.

If the other is not safe from you, you are not safe from you, as in, your InSelf is not safe from your outself (ML).

Safety is a primary issue for all life on earth.

Your fear is being expressed as anger toward another, ‘Fate/God’ and your InSelf (all of which are ‘the other’). But it leaves you the victim and powerless, in pain and suffering, and alienated from Life.

In blame, we are angry and afraid because we wanted something and think we cannot have it. We can blame externally or internally but that is the same thing in reality because the affect on your body is the same. Your anger and fear tightens the body and will bring you discomfort and pain if it continues to continue. The greater the tightness, the greater the pain. It is peace, joy and happiness that relax the body.

Depression is a way to stop any feeling because internally there is the perception that we can’t do anything about our wants, but the tightness remains.

[In general, those who blame themselves are likely to have been ‘bopped’ or punished in some manner in one or more previous lives, by receiving rather more aggression from (an)other(s) than they were sending out themselves. But, it’s still a blaming.]

Our powerlessness and ‘victim’ leave us feeling trapped, which means we cannot explore and like a caged tiger we tend to pace out the same path. Feeling trapped leads to rage. (GRANDIN quoting PANKSEPP.) We also get terribly bored. “If we do what we’ve always done, we will get what we’ve always got”. Our terribly clever society deals with this by giving out anti-depressants which is a bit like giving a captive tiger pills to make it lie down and stop pacing in its small cage. Then we can say, there’s no problem; enjoy your cage.

Our main ‘answer’ to boredom is to look for stimulation, which our world can provide in spades if the ‘racket’ of opinions, noise, entertainment, drugs of all kinds, and all forms of the media is sufficient to distract us, not to mention occupying yourself chasing P&C (see Chapter 2) in whatever form is available to you. The trouble here is that this can lead to overwhelm, and is basically like telling the tiger to be happy because its cage is now full of toys, not to mention a radio/TV blasting away, as in, ‘interesting/stimulating’ things for its mind. A pity about its body and its need to explore and to be a tiger, but there you go.

Victims want pity because of the powerlessness and self-pity and can be very angry (not necessarily consciously) when they don’t get it. This anger can turn them into a bully if/when they can be, especially to someone weaker or smaller eg, children. It is axiomatic that the victim and the bully are two ends of a single continuum, as in, both of them will be there in the one person, again, unconsciously. To repeat, in the adult, where there is victim, there will be a bully, and vice versa. Being bullied/ab-used as a child sets up the pattern for the adult who will present as a bully or a victim, but the other side will be there in the unconscious. (We sure don’t like this bit!)

The difference between wanting and having.

The general social myth is that you can have all that you want if you work hard enough, try hard enough etc, etc, and that happiness is found ‘out there’, and boy, do we keep trying if we can and too bad if we can’t. We are so far away from considering ‘in here’ that it may as well not exist; and thus it feels as if there is no other place to look except ‘out there’, so that is where we focus for everything that we want.

But this is a ‘wanting’ on our part because we don’t, or think we don’t, have it. But since life ‘out there’ is reflecting who is ‘in here’ (= unconscious/InSelf) whatever you want stays a ‘want’. We continue to search out there and try to force life to conform to our wishes. This is actually an attempt at domination on our part; we try to use power and control and connive and contrive and take, take, take as much as we possibly can for ourselves. This is our great picture of the ‘successful’ person, and some of us do ‘succeed’ in this life, but you may or may not have noticed that they are still ‘wanting’.

What’s really happening is the absolute fact of energy which is that you will never perceive yourself as having what you want unless you can give it to yourself, ie your InSelf = your internal ‘other’; your ‘in here’.

Turning your focus of attention away from the external to ask your ‘in here’ what it is that is really wanted by your InSelf is the submission, the ‘giving up’ trying to control the external to your tune.

This ‘taking responsibility’ for yourself is you working out how you can give your InSelf the internal State of having what you want. This, of course involves working out what these wishes are, and to do this you go inside and ask. (see Goal Setting) [And sometimes you have to ask quite nicely and repeatedly if you have been neglecting or bashing up your InSelf over the years.]

States belong in our physiology, ie, the body with its emotions (the soul), which are part of the InSelf, and thus it is the body that knows what we really want. Thus we have to go and ask it before we can get anywhere really. As I may have intimated above, this process requires your Time and Interest, Sustain and Protect (TISP), and it takes time to learn how to do that, but essentially what I am saying is that it can be done.

Learning how to give TISP to InSelf is how we get to Adult and full self-sufficiency and autonomy. Successfully giving TISP means being able to feed the emotional self which leaves us feeling ‘fed’ and ‘full’ ie ‘fulfilled’.

This is how you become powerful for yourself.

If you cannot find a way to love your InSelf, ie, ’the other’ (=GLS), you will not be able to grow, and will run from life because you cannot face it.

The interesting thing to me is that if we understood the bible story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden properly (see Addendum) we would be able to see that God tries to warn us not to judge (eat of the Tree) and especially not to blame because the outcome is pain felt by the body, and disconnection/alienation from the other and Life and the Garden of Eden. We insist on refusing to look at this story correctly and want to go on and on blaming when things don’t go our way. Is this having a tantrum or is this having a tantrum?

Thus my definition of ‘taking responsibility’ is the opposite of blame, and its effects are the opposite of blame as well because doing so empowers you.

However, to some blamers, the concept of ‘taking responsibility’ simply means blaming themselves which instantly leads to guilt/shame which feels much worse than anger or fear, and that person will simply run. This form of ‘taking responsibility’ is a type of blame and is disempowering; ‘in spades’ really. This form is not what this UUS is advocating.

What about forgiveness?

Forgiveness may help us feel like a ‘nice’ person but it still implies blame. The idea is to stop blame in the first place, then what’s to forgive? (lot’s more below) [PS. Eve doesn’t really want Adam to forgive her; she wants him to ‘grow up’ and stop blaming her in the 1st place.]

Normal concepts of Karma and dharma(XXX?) still imply blame; if you knew what these actually were in your own case, you wouldn’t be using these words. Much of our ‘karma’ is actually our own useless thinking, as in, concepts that don’t get us to TISP.

In sum.

Judgement and blame are an enormous part of our social legacy and we just don’t question them unless we are trying to learn to be more conscious.

Our fears about safety and wanting to get back to heaven are absolutely played upon by our current religions (and other institutions). Their teachings of the reasons for life are based upon maintaining P&C and keeping you as a child and staying fearful and thus more easily controlled, and we don’t like that either actually, so we get stuck.

This UUS has to address these fears, (which is why I ‘bang on’ a bit); as well as how to overcome them, which see below, but there has to be a reason to do so, else, why bother?

If you cannot find a way to love your InSelf, you will not be able to grow, and will run from life because you cannot face it. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ = love your InSelf first. Your InSelf is ‘the other’. Loving (giving TISP) your InSelf properly will lead to loving others, but InSelf has to be first.

Fear and the inability to face life and getting stuck are primary reasons for misery and suffering. The question of suffering has stumped many experts so I can be free to have a crack at this too.

The problem is the huge amount of suffering on earth and really having a hard time believing that …

1. Anyone who loved us would ‘drop us in it’, or, even more difficult to believe..

2. That anyone would choose to suffer.

So, which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Choice or Suffering?

I’ll choose choice first.

2nd - CHOICE.

The whole of this UUS is predicated on choice. You can choose to believe it or not. The person affected by this understanding is you. Your life is affected by your decisions and realizations/understandings. So, what’s the difference whether choice or not?

IFF (= if and only if) your whole life is your choice in line with the Universe for your highest good (and others, incidentally), then, your attitude to your life changes completely to considering using the events in your life and your reactions to them as information for you, your Self, personally about your InSelf whom you don’t know about.

These events and your reactions to them can be used, and I will outline below how to use them.

But it is your attitude that is the key.

However hard the circumstances can be, and hard can be hard, it is possible to change your attitude to one of ‘what do I need to know/See/understand about my InSelf here?’ and that allows us to take responsibility knowing that the outer world reflects our inner world. This attitude actually requires a kind of submission on your part, whereby you are accepting and allowing the actuality of Life out there to inform you about the Self inside you. So, there’s a strange irony here; in normal life we are told that we should be directing our lives in a purposeful fashion and so on, yet all spiritual teachings try to coach people to submit to life, which can feel ‘powerless’ on your part. Yet the effect is the opposite.

Taking responsibility empowers us. Considering that we may be at choice is the first step in the process. That is why some people say, ‘how have you chosen this?’, which to normal victims can sound perfectly awful. It is not a blaming, or a ‘fend for yourself’; it is the first question in a series of questions whereby you arrive at your own insights about your Self. Your insights help you to grow. Every time you encompass more experiences and events for your own insights, you expand and are able to assimilate and face more of life’s experiences. The opposite is to blame others and be a victim and to become fearful of life, which will shrink you and make you ever more fearful or angry and so on. Blame disempowers you – always; however ‘easier’ or ‘more fun’ it seems to be. Taking responsibility empowers you.

It is much easier to take responsibility if you are able to consider the concept that at some level you have chosen whatever these circumstances may be that you have just dropped yourself in once again. (Grammar???)

Apart from that, there is no point whatsoever is coercing or forcing people to do whatever. Love has to give choice, otherwise it is not love.

It is also true that the less conscious you are about your own inner workings the less you will feel at choice in your life. One of the many advantages of becoming conscious is the increased feeling of choice in your world.

If you can come at choice in this and thus able to submit to the information that life can give you; you can use Mirror Laws with the Insight Tool to find out what that usefulness might be, which see below.

Two other useful concepts and their attendant attitudes are ‘Nothing is an accident’ and ‘Most Beneficial Outcome (MBO)’. They do slightly different things.

Nothing is an accident.

This is quite a concept and a very strong/forceful one in terms of confronting you with Life’s (and your InSelf’s) effort to Serve you. Accepting it helps you focus on what you are judging, and facing it in terms of making any particular event/thing/matter more defined by you. Not easy, but useful. It is hardly generally socially acceptable, because most people consider it a form of blame.

Most Beneficial Outcome (MBO).

This one is ‘softer’ and it’s a way of reminding you that things can and do turn out well (eventually). It helps you relax and stop worrying which leads to a better outcome anyway, as well as helping you learn to trust that anything that happens to you can be useful for you. It is thus great for helping build trust in GLS.

This UUS provides spiritual support as a reason and method (see below) for facing one’s own problems in the physical, mental and emotional departments of life. It’s a useful way to support one’s self in finding meaning in life and learn how to live it in a ‘proper’ manner, i.e. ‘right living’ for you. ‘Right living’ means living in a manner that is ‘right’ for you; not anyone else’s definition.

(NB. ‘Righteous’ as used in the Bible means proper or correct or right, as in ‘right living’; it has nothing to do with ‘self-righteousness’, which = I am right.)

Now we turn to Suffering.