Part of God's Creations; ITS&FYD:ch1pt2

God as Unity Creates Life of which we are a Part.

WHO OR WHAT IS GOD?

In which we explore how to refer God, as well as concepts that ‘belong’ to God, such as Creation, Manifestation and Expression. We then go on to consider what God might be wanting to carry out.

NAMING

First of all. The Language problem.

This discussion is about our personal relationship as a human being with a single source that some of us call God, and who we are in that.

First, we have the problem of naming and referring to this Unity; God, Unity, Universe, Life, Creation, Nature, the One, the Source, Allah, and so on. BECK uses ‘Whatever’ which is as good a name as any.

I could ‘cook up’ a single word to try to cover these concepts, or Unity could be a useful choice, but for this writing I’m going to use the word God because that is the word that means the most to me.

The English language has the pronouns ‘he’ ‘she’ and ‘it’ for males, females, and things. ‘He’ has traditionally and supposedly been taken to include ‘she’, but many women are quite tired of this, as in fact they do not feel included much if at all. However we do not have a pronoun to encompass a concept of Unity or a single source. If we use ‘It’ for God, we still get into trouble because it depersonalizes Her and feels essentially incorrect.

I am going to use Her and She when referring to God. Most of my readers will be women and of course (!) men should automatically feel included when I use ‘she’ in this discussion. [After all ‘he’ is included in ‘she’.] I have kept the capitals to remember the largeness of God.

God and Her Names. How to refer to this Bigness?

God has a lot of names which basically boil down to…

·      the ONE; Unity, Source, Allah, etc. ie, the Creator

·      and the EVERYTHING; Universe, Nature, All, etc. ie, the Created.

Thus, to repeat; God as a Unity or a Wholeness as a single source is the Creator of Life, as well as Everything that She has Created.

‘God as Unity’ implies that the creation of life comes from this particular Unity, a word that intrinsically implies that

a. something is unified or whole or complete, as well as..

b. it is possible for there to be a dis-unity or dis-union of something, ie there can be more than one part and these can be separated or split. These concepts are key elements in this discussion.

The crux of this is then, that this Unity is required for the Creation of Life.

What then, is this Unity of something that has been Split?

I tackle this question later, because it is a very big one.

God is Exploring Energy and Expressing what She finds.

She does this by Creating Life.

God Creates Life.

What then, is Creation?

It is an idea that has been manifested; it has been made in the physical world. It may have originated as an idea or inspiration, but now it can be seen in the physical. It is an expression of God’s concepts made apparent to God; God’s expression of Her Self for Herself. God’s expression is her owning of HerSelf to HerSelf (and us). God knows HerSelf by owning HerSelf. It is the expression that is the key here. ‘In the beginning was the word.’

And this creation has Life.

The definition of Life is that it can itself give life to another form in whatever manner, which can include service or support for the growth of that other life. Maybe we could say it has and gives energy for growth to another.

Thus, these creations have a life of their own apart from their creator. They can stand apart, by themselves.

That manifested thing, by definition, is part of the energy of the creator, and in the process of manifesting this creation the creator has learnt and now knows more about Her own Self and her possibilities.

God creates Life for Her own sake and Her own expression, as an Exploration of the limits of Her own energy for Herself. This exploration teaches Her about energy and who She is in that. She loves doing this and loves what She finds out about Herself as She does it.

Since this God-created thing has Life, it will want to find out about its own energy because that Life is part of God. And as it does so for itself, God finds out even more about Herself. [Consider for a moment what you have learnt about yourself from your children.]

Since God is exploring energy, Exploration will be a primary drive for living things. This fits in with Panksepp’s SEEK emotion in animals. (see GRANDIN).

It is something so intrinsic to all life that we can fail to notice its importance to us to be able to do so.

And so are we exploring.

How then, do we as human beings, and thus part of God and Life, explore the energy of our selves to find out who is there and express what we have found?

We do this by…

·      Being manifested/created ourselves; ie we are alive on earth. And

·      Checking out (exploring) what else God has created, and

·      Checking out (exploring) what we ourselves are able to create/manifest/express in our own lives.

·      Checking out what others have done and found in their explorations; ie their expression.

This exploration and what we make of it comes though our experiences of being human beings and there are an awful lot of experiences to be had on earth alone, not to mention anywhere else.

Thus, we need experience of life, as in, lots of ways of being, to explore fully the limits of our own energy. This experience brings us (eventually) an understanding/realization of what is intrinsically our own essence; our ‘who is in Here’. Learning what is our own takes time. Our understanding of Life is what we ‘make of’ our experiences of life

To sum up

·      God is a Unified Largeness which is exploring the limits of all energy.

·      This Unified energy can create Life which can create and/or support other life. It can give energy to another, and so on. (This is ‘Life Eternal’)

·      Creation is the manifestation of a concept. But the Creation of Life is something else. Creating is an exploration of self, as is the creation. (That which is created contributes to the creator’s exploration of self as well as the created’s exploration of self.) Exploring is built in to Life.

·      In fact, Life is for exploring. Exploring leads to understanding.

·      We explore through the experience of what is manifested in our lives. And thus we need Life on Earth for these experiences.

All human beings are part of Life and Nature and the created, and must therefore be also part of God. All Life is God. The challenge for human beings is not only to Create but to figure out how they can consciously Create Life from their own self, which is what God is doing.

[Notice here that the terms God, Life, Nature, the Universe, and your own self/person (as a created entity and part of Life/Nature) can be used interchangeably. What?! Really!! Well, that’s the logic of it.

A drop of the ocean is still part of the ocean and holds its properties within itself. What then? Does this make a difference to you, and how you might treat yourself or others?]

The next concept is..

Exploring energy is a delight.

God loves exploring and what She finds out about Herself and She loves her creations and what they find out about themselves. This ‘finding out’ gives us Insight.

Insight = to see inwardly/Internally/inside; to gain an understanding about our internal or intrinsic truth or beingness or the energy of our own self.

[I will be using See with a capital ‘S’ to denote insight.]

Seeing is an Internal Insight into the Truth of Self. It is a making sense of a plethora of information of any kind from our own and others’ experiences. It is an internal certainty that arises as we remember and understand who we are bit by bit. We have learnt something about ourselves and it is as if we have given ourselves a gift. The body sensation is of a ‘ding’ or an ‘aha’ or ‘the light turned on’ or we feel ‘lighter’. It is delightful and it de-lights us; there is a bit of joy here. We also tend to feel more relaxed and can breathe more easily. We ‘encompass’ more and become a bit ‘bigger’; we grow. We learn more about ourselves and that discovery feels good.

NB. Having Seen It feels good; the process of getting there may not.

God delights in her Insights and so can we.

There are some other things to notice here as well.

·      Insight takes time; a lot of time and a lot of experiencing. Yet, once we have it, we don’t really care any more about how long it took to get it, and that can be a long time.

·      Once we have it, we cannot lose it, ever. “Insight is the wealth of the Soul.”

·      It does not come through theory; it comes through experience and the understanding we gain through that experience.

·      It makes us feel bigger in terms of allowing Life to be as it is. We have encompassed more of our own energy; we know ourselves more and have thus ‘grown’. We can allow and accept Life and what it has shown us. ‘Live and let live.’ This process can ultimately lead to trust.

Thus the logic of Creation, Manifestation, Exploring, Expression and Seeing implies that we must be alive on earth for us to be able to See ourselves. We can only gain Insight into ourselves through experiencing what we ourselves are manifesting in life. How do we know who we really are if we have no experience of/from/within our selves?

NB. The use of the words ‘understanding/realization’ and ‘insight’ are being used as, ‘there is no real understanding without experience’. The trouble with using words such as these is that it is possible to think you know or have knowledge of or understand or have insight into something if you have studied it enough and so on. In all this discussion I limit the use of the word ‘understand’ to what you end up realizing out of your own experience. We may sympathize with others, but in fact rarely really ‘understand’ another’s experience unless we have pretty well experienced the same circumstances.

So, What Might God be Wanting For Herself?

How do we think that we might know? If we are a part of God, then God can’t be that much different from us. Well, what gives human beings the most pleasure and satisfaction and can we extrapolate back up? In this I am using human psychology to guess at God’s.

·      We know that creativity and self-expression are important.

·      We know that relationships are important.

·      We know that family and children are important.

·      We know that feeling good about ourselves is important.

·      We know that exploring is important.

·      We know that experience is important.

·      We know that we need experiences to truly find out about ourselves (Insights).

Consider this extrapolation.

The crux here is that God wants to explore and experience everything because She knows that truly Understanding Who She Is and what She can encompass comes only from experience and that these insights or Understandings are fun. She learns more about herself as She experiences it all. She loves finding out about Herself and expressing that.

She also loves her creativity in terms of both loving the act of creating and feeling good about what She has done, as well as loving the things that She creates. She wants to share this creative ability and this great delight in it all.

So God breaks Herself up into squillions of bits so that each can have fun as well. She is now nothing but her creations and yet She is in everything. (Nowhere and everywhere at the same time. A fine example of God’s many puzzles.)

Since they are part of Her they get to experience and understand for themselves and so does She. As we learn to know ourselves, God learns more about Herself. In this manner everyone wins.

and we want what God wants because we are each a bit of God.

To See, to Know our Selves and to Create New Life as we Express that Self.

Your experiences and understandings help you define you.

The experience is absorbing and the understanding is enthralling. We’ve ‘Seen’ something.

We are creative beings; it is automatic, but the real question is ‘what have we created?’ and thus ‘how do we feel inside about what we have created out there, i.e. the result’? We too are looking for that feeling of satisfaction with what we have created or expressed from within our selves; to feel good about what we have done.

Parts of God

Each of us is created by God and are a part of God and are thus also God, because Everything is God. Well, logically that’s what the names we use for God are implying.

But, as parts of God, we need/want to be able to explore our own energy and to experience what we manifest in Life. If we want to See ourselves (and thus God) we have to be apart from God to be able to do this.

We are a Part having to be Apart to See God.

God has worked out that the only way we can See ourselves and See God is to be apart from Her.

When we are a part of God, we are simply God. As a foetus growing in a womb is part of the woman and not an entity in its own right, so are we when we are part of God, and it feels heavenly to be merged in this way. As the child separates from the mother as it is born to begin its journey of differentiation, so we need to be apart from God to enable us to See Her plus define/know Our Self as separate or differentiated from others.

Humans do seem to have this basic feeling memory of ‘heaven’ internally and do want to find it again. But my argument here is that this ‘heaven’ feeling comes from being part of God which we actually are always, but in Life on Earth we are learning to see God and ‘know’ ourselves by being apart from God.

But we don’t like feeling apart. It hurts and we feel frightened and lost and cold and alone.

A Preamble; ITS&FYD.ch1,pt1.

A PREAMBLE

In which we explore what God might be considering when designing a system for life eternal, and why.

It’s all about God dreaming up a way for Her to have fun forever, which is a very long time.

So, what is Fun?

God likes finding out things about herself that She didn’t know before and She likes figuring it out Herself, and when She really works it out She wants to Shout about it. This is called Expression. ‘In the beginning was the word.’

God knows She only really learns and understands things through experiencing them. Understanding is enthralling and a nice ‘zing’ or ‘aha’ when a Light comes on. The more experience, the more understanding; therefore how get to experience everything to the max?

God likes ‘SEEK’. (see GRANDIN. The term is used by Panksepp quoted in Grandin and Panksepp uses capitals for this drive/emotion.) (Another name for this is Exploring)

Imagining and Creating all sorts of things in a self-sustaining system is pretty interesting too.

God loves what She has found, and wants others to have lots of fun too, so then She can share with them and they with Her.

Well, what about splitting into billions of little sparks of awareness that are like Her (‘cos they’re part of Her) and want to have fun forever with lots of different experiences. Since they are part of Her, they are going to find experiencing and finding out about life, the Universe and everything lots of fun too, and they will want to share what they have found.

So, what would keep them entertained and occupied forever?

Now this is complex and there are some things to think about here.

They will need methods to See themselves because it is very difficult to work out who they are in the absence of anything else around them. They will also need contrasts so that they can experience All of it and learn to work out what they do and don’t want, and the consequences of that.

Any spark of me will contain and have access to infinity, because they are part of Me so they will need large worlds and lots of little ones with plenty of scope for plenty of experiences in all ways.

Some things will need to last forever, and some things won’t, and these little bits of me will need time to understand what they’ve learnt, and if they’re beginners they’ll want a chance to do things over again if they don’t like it, or they may want it differently, or better or not at all, because they’ll want free choice, as I have; yet forever is really a long time, so they may want time out, as well as feedback…..

Also, the best fun is when they work it out for themselves, so they’ll need a system that can maintain them, and give them hints all the time so as they will know where to look

So, I’ll set up a closed system that will look after them, and then they can explore.

It has to be…

·      Absolutely absorbing and involving.

·      Utterly fascinating forever.

·      Always learning, developing, creating, experiencing.

·      Encompassing growth.

·      Feeding Seek, ie exploration and curiosity to search, investigate and make sense of what we find.

·      Able to make mistakes and start again.

·      Free choice to do whatever they want, so as they can find out what happens and learn to understand the consequences of their choices.

·      Ultimately highly rewarding as they learn to express themselves.

·      Emotional measuring system to tell them how they’re going.

·      Built-in feedback mechanism including pain to let them know when they need to talk to me or someone else.

·      Others to act as mirrors, so that they can See if they wish.

·      An assessment and debriefing system so they can recap and refine.

·      Time out for a breather and can come back to Me.

Excellent!!

The spark is part of the Creator, as the sperm is part of the father, or the drop of the ocean is part of the ocean, the cell is part of the body, or a flute is part of an orchestra.

The qualities here are that the spark is an individual that is separate but is also part of a whole. Here is the first duality. Characteristics are shared between source and spark, yet the spark is not the source. The part is the microcosm, the source is the macrocosm.

Thus, As a spark of God,

You have all the time in the world and out of it. You go on forever. A life eternal. What are you going to do with that? Play harps forever?? Forever is a long time. What about Seek/Explore? What about Express? You are part of God; you will want Seek and Express, and you will go on desiring that. It is built into animals as well.

Life is an experience. We truly understand nothing unless we experience it. The rest is simply theory.

So --- POP!

Well, here you are – a person born on earth and you’re not that impressed.

A vale of tears.

Suffering in all directions.

Famine, fires, and floods – fat lot of fun here!

“Yeah; well; I suppose there are some compensations, but I’m getting fat and tired and sex isn’t much fun any more and the kids are so-so, and nearly off our hands – thank God.”

What a strange world? It’s lasted billions of years say the geologists, and just over 4,000 says some religious groups. At the rate we’re going, it won’t last much longer thinks everybody except businessmen and politicians. What will the rat race do then?

So here you are? What on earth for? What’s all this about?

This is you – a piece of humanity in the physical – different from anybody else – as unique as your DNA says you are.

You have a personality. Your friends seem to know what it is – you seem to know what theirs is. You don’t really know what yours is. Do you?

You have the potential to be and do what? Others tell you. There’s things that you want; things you have to do. Others seem to have it all. Where’s mine?

Does everybody go through this eat, sleep, grow up, school (maybe), learn the rules, earn a living, just so the next generation can eat, sleep, grow up, etc…. what for?

All looking for love, striving for what?

So many things the same; so many differences; so many things I know; so many things I don’t.

Every person different; the more you know them, the more you realize their world is different from your own.

We have one life only to encompass this. What? Really?

We have lots of lives to encompass this. What? Really?

Who’s right? Who’s wrong? The whole thing is a heap of hooey, isn’t it?

We have history – do we still have all these wars?

Who were they? What about all those who have been before me?

But the great cry is…

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What for?

How does any/all of this make sense?

What is the point of it all?

How do I make sense of all the things we’re told to do ‘out there’?

Who’s right, who’s wrong and why????

So, what are my answers here and who am I to give them?

In the end, what follows are my own answers that make sense to me out of all these questions. They help me and greatly, which is why I’m writing them. They may or may not be correct, and they are certainly likely to be incomplete. They may or may not help you, but it is my responsibility to write what I have found to be true for me, and it is your responsibility to do with them as you please.

Introduction to the Posts on this Blog

INTRODUCTION     March 2013

About me. Who am I?

I have spent a lifetime looking for ‘what I was supposed to be doing’, casting around, never really happy, quite sorry for myself, and wondering what it was all about. Others seemed to be happy; to find love, a partner, children, and to have fun, achieve, and find recognition, etc. etc, etc. So, what was wrong with me?

Being single meant that I had time to read, so I did; a great deal; mostly psychology, personal growth, the esoteric, and ‘New Age’. So, I went on, learning, watching and thinking about what seemed to work or make sense and what did not.

By the time I was 50, I felt progressively more trapped and I did not like the person I was becoming. I also had the feeling that if I did not change this, I would get ‘hit by a truck’. I tried to make changes, but became ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which left me feeling very stuck indeed.

However, at the end of that year, (of being 50), and through my apparently disastrous attempts at change (through worrying about the truck), I ‘fell over’ someone who helped me greatly with both goal-setting and clearing the fears that stopped me getting to them.

It still took another 10 years to integrate and understand what I had learnt within the context of what I had read and experienced, but in the end, writing this is ‘what I am ‘sposed to be doing’ and it has taken me quite some time (more years) to face ‘coming out’ with ideas that make sense to me, but are so counter to what we are taught.

Emotional pain and physical illness have been the sticks that made this donkey get a move on and search for whatever carrots I could find. It is my ‘sticks’ that have taught me all I know; if I got what I thought I wanted or deserved during my earlier years, I simply congratulated myself, or thought I had it all under control, until the next time that I had not.

About the posts.

The posts that follow are mostly sections of chapters of a book that I am writing called “Integrating the Shadow and Finding Your Direction” (ITS&FYD). I would like to say that it is all planned out and chapters and sections will be completed in due course, but this is not the case. The book seems to have a mind and a timing of its own. Chapters or Sections that I think will be easy aren’t, and get huge in front of my eyes. So, you won’t find any plan or outline here, at least at this stage.

But, because it is a book, the posts are not simply topics in isolation, and are not meant to be read that way. They depend on concepts and logic developed in previous sections. Also, the nature of posting to a blog means that the posts end up ‘backwards’, in that they really need to be read from the bottom up, not the top down, which is how they are presented to the reader. Not to mention, my posts are much longer than ‘normal’.

In fact, I hope to eventually set up my own web-site when there is rather more to mount than so far, but that’s in the future.

The first chapter is called Structures because I am using it to build a platform or foundation for more complex ideas.

The second chapter will come…sometime….

About the book.

I find it very difficult to easily say what the book is about. It is how I make sense of all that I have read, learned, observed and experienced. It is not a philosophy or a theory; it is what I have found as I chipped away at facing my rubbish and as I cleared my useless decisions, so there is a kind of ‘take it or leave it’ flavour to it. It is my ideas on the purpose and meaning of life on earth, and it is what works for me, which is why I call it a Useful Understanding System. But its primary purpose is as a vehicle for what I would call the Insight Tool which I developed or modified from others’ methods, and how it works, as well as why it works.

The Insight Tool is my psychological method for turning my shit or sewage (or what I was shitty about) into fertilizer for my own growth. In effect, I found that I could use what I didn’t want to get me to where I did want to go or what I did want. This sounds a bit daft, or almost backwards, but I had had no idea of what I really wanted; I had only developed a lifetime’s experience of what I did not want.

I tried to tell people about this wonderful method that was manifestly helping me get what I wanted, but all who knew me thought it was ‘luck’.

Eventually, I began to understand that this method needs a lot of explaining because it is so counter to our cultural and social understandings. Not only is the method itself counter to ‘normal’, it is best used within a framework of ideas that are also counter to normal. This framework itself has come out of what I have found as I have worked with this method.

Thus, it seemed to me that if I had to explain what it was and how to use it, I needed to explain the framework within which it works.

Over the last 2-3 decades, there has been increasing emphasis by ‘New Age’ enthusiasts on concepts such as ‘spirituality’ and ‘unconditional love’; so there tends to be lots of ‘love and light’ hanging around. However, Jung said something to the effect of.. ‘One does not find the light by ignoring the dark’. Accepting one’s own very spotty internal self, warts and all, is the hard part as far as I’m concerned, but infinitely worth it.

In the end, as far as I can see it, most people do not want to know about their problems because they believe that they can not be ‘fixed’. It’s too hard and just means pain for no point. In fact, people will not look unless they know first that the problem can be solved, and there is very little anywhere that tells us this can be possible, so we run and run, and hope things will change….

This book then, is saying that..

1. Your problems can be solved, or they can be useful to you, or you can become a lot happier about them, which means much less pain and sorrow
2. That it really is worth looking; there is every point in doing so..

..and here’s why and how.

so, Who are my audience?

Errm I don’t know. It’s likely to be some proportion of..

            Other ‘Seekers’,

            Beck’s ‘Mender’ types,

            NFs (the ‘Idealists’) of the MBTI,

            HSPs,

            People trying to make sense of what we are taught about life,

            Someone looking for a way through to their own creativity,

            Those who use Byron Katie’s ‘Turn it Around’ (= the Work).

The story of developing the Insight Tool.

(Other names for this tool/method could be Shit-Shifting or Bug-Hunting, but I’m not sure.)

In early 1999 I did an NLP course with Jon Brenton and a small group of students. Jon himself was trained by Tad James who in tandem with the NLP also uses a method he developed called TimeLine (T/L) Therapy. The 2 methods together are most effective for goal-setting and for clearing the things that stop us getting them, hence I consider them very important.

NLP is a suite of techniques based on an understanding of how the mind works. These techniques are great for solving problems, and we ‘bring the problems up’ by setting goals. Thus, during the course we were asked for our goals (what do you want to be, do, or have?) and what our values about these goals were. Then we ranked the values from most important to the least. Then we would look at what we actually had versus what we valued and they were usually the opposite of what we valued.

Then we would put these values and their opposites on our different hands, asking ourselves what each taught us about the other. It was fascinating to feel our hands wanting to come together as we ‘understood’ (not always consciously) what that learning was.

We also learnt to picture our goals and to put them into the future, and then we would TimeLine the fears that came up. I think that Jon had modified Tad’s T/L script to better fit in with how he wanted to use it.

This worked fairly well for me, although I had an enormous amount of trouble with the actual goal-setting, and asking me my values stumped me greatly. Also, some things I worked on didn’t really seem to stick. However there was so much for me to work on that it seemed to be a very moot point.

Jon continued to run a group for us on a weekly basis where some 5-10 people would come and we would practice our NLP. Jon gave me enormous help with traumas and goal-setting; hours and hours of help. This is to say I needed a lot of help, and got it. It sounds a bit dramatic to say that it saved my life, but that is how it feels.

I was also trying to understand what I had been taught and how to use it, since I would have liked to have been as effective as I considered Jon to be for me and others. However, I suspected I just did not have the mind for it, in terms of speed of thinking. I also found that I was more interested in the unconscious methods rather than the conscious ones.

Eventually, another woman in this group, Susan Oliver, spotted that re-doing the opposites, as in, looking for the opposite of the 1^st 2 opposites, (the AO2) really did seem to make the process stick. She used the words ‘absolute opposites’. This was a breakthrough for me; the insights were so interesting and the goal-setting seemed to work better. She also taught me to clap my hands together as they came together.

As the years went by I spent a lot of time working on myself by myself. I was still ill with the Chronic Fatigue, and trying to work out how on earth to keep myself afloat. There was still an awful lot wrong with me, and I was still trying to work out how to get better. I had already had a great deal of help for free but couldn’t keep doing that, and couldn’t afford to pay for help from others, so DIY was what I got to do.

Besides, it helped me relax as nothing else could, and I loved it. It is a way of ‘tracking’ one’s self, and I found it fascinating and absorbing, and really, it gave me hope; I knew no other way of beating this illness, and I was hunting down the ‘hidden advantages’, which Jon taught us about as part of the course.

I had noticed with trying to goal-set that I was often better off starting from what I didn’t want in the absence of any idea of what I did want. It would end up as a see-saw as I went from one side to the other developing the concepts and building up a ‘picture’.

From reading Byron Katie’s books, I learnt about ‘turning it around’ and started to do this to what I wanted to complain about (aka ‘judge thy neighbour). Invariably I would find that I had done to others in a previous life exactly what I most complained about in this one. It was through this that I began to formulate the Mirror Laws.

From reading about the MBTI, I began to realize that the questions that start the process of ‘looking’ didn’t work that well for me, and in fact work much better when tailored to the person’s type.

I also modified the goal-setting and the T/L scripts to run together, and found that if I had done the 1^st set of opposites (the AO1s) properly and thoroughly the script would ‘run’ well, and I would get a great deal out of it. The AO2 would ‘lock’ that process in, and so I trundled on.

Once I had this method in place, and had practised it over and over, and seen the results which I liked so much, it gave me more reason to trust that I could handle whatever turned up in my life. Thus I could learn to ‘trust life’ and allow and enjoy.

So, this is how I learnt to turn my shit into fertilizer for me.

In all the ‘New Age’ spiritual stuff, the primary emphasis was always on meditation and stilling the mind, but I had a mind that would not stay still ever, and I simply could not meditate. Neither was I at all sure that I wanted to be like those who could, since I felt vaguely allergic to the ‘loving’ tall, generally bearded men in flowing clothes (especially the ones who liked to look like guess who) who taught such things. Eventually, I learned to address every single concern that crashed around in my mind by using this method, and what I learned in the process is what I am writing about here.

I love this method that has brought me so much, and that is why I want to tell others about it.

It is not the be-all and end-all; of course there are other methods. For starters, it does not deal with trauma, which I suspect needs 2 people.

Well, am I going to tell people what this method actually is?

I intend to spell out the method at a later stage. This is partly because there are some aspects that I am not sure about.

Primarily, the T/L script is a hypnotic script and is trademarked, as are others if they are worth anything. Tad James invented Timeline Therapy and Jon modified the scripts for his own use, so both have intellectual input. I may be able to use them for my own purposes, but I must not publish them. Sadly, Jon died in December 2012, so I cannot ask him. It is a major part of the method and I am not sure how else to present it. I know of nothing else more relevant or more effective, and I have looked. However, I really will have to find another way for this part of the method

I have not done another NLP course with another trainer, so I do not know which bits that we were taught were part of Jon’s own training as both a teacher and a psychiatric nurse, or part of a more ‘standard’ NLP course.

I think Dilts uses the opposites and I suspect the understanding of its value is more ‘around’ now than then, but it was Susan Oliver who spotted doing it twice, and showed me, and for that I am extremely grateful.

The end.

The Black Horse and the White Horse. An allegory.

[I wrote this after I had been ill for about 8 years with fybromyalgia/CFS. I am a lot better now, some 6 years further on, but I was trying to get the ‘flavour’ of what some of the realisations were as time went by.]

Once upon a time a cart drawn by two horses, one black and one white, came clip-clopping along the road.

The day was warm and bright and clear, the sun shone and the sky was blue. The cart was well-cared for with bright paint and shiny wheels. The driver was neither young nor old; just happy to be driving along.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the black horse stumbled and nearly fell. It neighed and stopped, shivering. Our driver called ‘gee-up’ and flicked the reins, and the horse stood still. Then the driver pulled out a whip, and tried to whip the horse to keep going. The horse went a few more steps and then collapsed, with the cart jutting out at an odd angle, although the white horse was still standing. Now the driver did not know what to do; she tried to make the white horse keep pulling, but the cart just went in circles, and the black horse was clearly in trouble. This was a shock.

Now there was nothing to be done but to get off the road and onto the verge. Several other carts stopped to help and eventually somehow, driver, cart, and horses ended up sitting beside the road wondering what to do. Other people stopped with advice on what to do for the black horse, but most of that entailed taking time to wait and figure out what was wrong, and the driver wanted to get going again. It was also very difficult to work out who to listen to or what advice was worth taking. Some people were kind and stayed for a while, and some people gave them food, but by evening they too had had to leave, and now the driver and horses were alone.

After a long and lonely night, the next day dawned with little change, and everyone hungry. The black horse was clearly no better, so the driver took the white horse and went further along the road to find more grass and water, as well as food for herself.

Then she came back and waited; there was nothing else to do, but the horse did not get better.

The days passed. After a while the driver began to notice the other vehicles on the road. It was busy, and most of the traffic was heading in the same direction. There was a sense of urgency to get to where they were heading. The drivers looked to neither right nor left, only ahead, and pushed their horses on. The carts were of all different types, big ones lumbering along, piled high with baggage and people, barely moving along in comparison to some of the smallest and fastest carts zipping along. Large and small, high and low, wide and slim, cared for and uncared for. Some limped along with tired horses, but of them all few looked to one side or saw our driver sitting there with her horses. Those that did see them, looked sorry for them, but then looked away and drove on.

The days passed. The driver had by then made several forays on the white horse to get food, and began to see that there were quite a lot of empty or broken down carts all along the roadside. Their drivers had usually left and taken their horses with them, but she did not know where.

The days passed. And now the driver had to look further afield to find food. There was a field on the other side of the fence, and across the field the land sloped upward toward a wooded area, which looked inviting so she went to have a look. By this time, the black horse was able to walk a very small way before collapsing, so slowly they made their way to the wooded area, away from the road. From this vantage point she was able to see that the road went on and on, and was full of traffic hurrying along, but she was still unable to see the end of it, or where they were heading.

The days passed, and the weather began to change. The driver was able to build a small hut, and to start to collect food and to grow a little. With the white horse she was still able to take short rides, do her errands, and make new friends. She met others who had also been forced to stop. She began to notice that there were nice things that she could do; a cup of tea; listen to the birds; feel the wind in her hair. She even began to talk to her horses, and they began to talk to her – mostly horsy thoughts of course, such as, where was the next bit of grass coming from? , but at other times they told her who was coming and why, which was handy.

The days passed, and she walked down to the road and watched the traffic pass by. Did they know where they were going, and in such a hurry? She had not known where she was going; it just seemed to be ‘There’; the potential answer to all her problems. They pitied her because she couldn’t get to There, and never would, but gradually she started to pity them, because of all the little things that they were missing out on; how strange that felt. She tried to tell them about these things, but they looked at her as if she was mad, and drove on.

The days passed, and she realised that she had dropped out. She was never going to find out what was at the end of that road. The black horse recovered enough to draw the cart in harness for a short while when necessary, but she had discovered that she liked being able to talk to horses and look at the stars when she pleased.

Sometimes others nearby seemed to get better and leave, and some did not. Nobody seemed to know why.

The most surprising thing was that gradually other people began to ask her for her expertise in talking to horses, which pleased her immensely. Fancy that for a career! She had never thought of that one!

And in the end, she found she was happy.

kind regards,

ce’s

2 Topics – Some Numerology and some Observations about 29/11s.

Topic 1. Numerology and 7-year ‘passages’.

In Gail SHEEHY’s ‘Passages’, she noticed that we seem to have to assess and absorb our life experiences at roughly 7 year intervals. If we miss these steps or passages, we start to get into trouble, especially with finding meaning or sense for all the things that happen to us as the years go by.

Although the 7 year periods basically correspond with the transiting cycle of Uranus, they don’t seem to correspond to the sign or house that Uranus is in. There seems to be a theme running along underneath. It seems to me that these periods correspond to their numerology which goes like this.

This is what the numbers mean….

1.                  independent creativity

2.                  partnership, relating, the other

3.                  communication

4.                  building and setting up foundations; practicality

5.                  dependence and independence

6.                  ideals and perfectionism; getting it ‘right’

7.                  belief systems, religion, finding meaning

8.                  analysis and finding authority

9.                  understanding and synthesis

10.             focus (0) on independent creativity (1)

11.             finding 2 forms of independent creativity (2 x1s) or more relating (2)

12.             independent creativity and relationship (1 as well as 2)

and these are the passages through the ages of…

0-7         the first         1. independent creativity, but you are making you.

8-14       second        2. the realization of the other comes in, and how to relate.

15-21     third              3  communication and how to do that is important.

22-28     fourth            4. building for the future; laying foundations.

29-35     fifth               5. wrestling with dependence and independence.

36-42     sixth             6. what are my ideals; how do I get it right for me?

43-49     seventh        7. belief systems; finding meaning.

50-56     eighth           8. analysing what has happened and finding authority.

57-63     ninth 9. understanding and synthesizing; the over-view.

64-70     tenth 10. actual independent creativity this time; a new life.

71-77     eleventh       11. even more creativity; 2 forms or more relating?

78-84     twelfth          12. creativity and relationships, but the 1 plus the 2 makes 3 which can also give an emphasis on communication and also implies groups.

This system can go on of course, using the numbers. The 13^th passage can ‘bring in’ more building (1 plus 3 = 4) and so on.

Does this system ‘fit in’ with how you are finding your life?

See also Gail SHEEHY; Passages.

Topic 2. Having 29/11 as Birth number or Life Path number.

If born 29^th of the month, you will be 29/11 as a Birth number.

Birth path numbers are found by totalling all the numbers in your birthday eg. 15/6/1952 is processed as 1+5+6+1+9+5+2 = 29 and 2+9 = 11 MILLMAN expresses this as 29/11.

You may be aware that in Numerology the double numbers are ‘master numbers’, which may sound quite good to have, but in reality they can be quite a trial all of their own.

As a 29/11 this is what I have found.

This number means that its owner is moving from relating to the other (the 2) to finding 2 independent forms of creativity. Not 1 – but 2, which is something I have not read or found anywhere else, but have observed in myself and other 29/11’s. I thought finding 1 form was hard enough, but having to find 2!?

It’s as if we have a dream of partnership with the other but are simply not allowed to have it in this lifetime at least until we develop our own relationship with our Internal self (or the inner child).

If we don’t find these 2 forms of creativity, we seem to end up alone anyway (particularly in later life); eg, awake in the middle of the night as the partner sleeps on.

What are these 2 forms? What the dickens!!

I can only answer in general.

There will be an external form and an internal form; so what do I mean here?

One of them will come from inside, as in, be your own feelings, senses, intuition and/or thoughts, and the other will be about using or doing things outside you or external to you. This can include working with others ideas or intuitions, or making things and so on. But, in all of this, you will be initially at least, working by yourself, or if it’s a group, you are leading it through your own energy; it can be there because of you but you are not part of it.

The other thing to notice is that both of these forms must be in your life and balanced in terms of both having space in your life fairly concurrently, and possibly daily.

Much of the time, there is a great desire to be of direct use to others (that 9) or to create things that may be of use to others, so there can be a need to be careful not to wear the body out if doing service to the other. Wearing yourself out is generally an indication that you’re not looking in the right place for a creative outlet that is correct for you.

In MBTI terms you will probably need to access and integrate both the tertiary function and the opposite of the secondary to get to where you want to go, which takes time. The 2 forms of creativity seem to be from the primary and the inferior functions. There’s plenty of information about MBTI on the web, but not much about the tertiary function. I intend to tackle this topic at a later date, but it’s a big one.

29/11’s generally come across as gentle people with often a strong host/ess quality, but the internal drive of the 29/11 to find these creative outlets is absolutely intense, although it tends to get buried not only for the sake of maintaining relationships with the other, but it all seems so unreasonable to need 2 forms when it’s hard enough for most people to get to find their 1, and the ‘forever’ searching and dissatisfaction appear fairly peculiar (and possibly even ‘greedy’) to others; you’re just not grateful for what you have and so on.

This seems a bit short, and with very little to ‘fix’ the problemo, but I have written this as a warning or a confirmation (depending on how you look at it) for those of us struggling with this ‘master’ number.

kind regards,

ce’s

See also, Dan MILLMAN; The Life you were born to live.