WHAT’S GOING ON?  #81 May 2001

ALONG THE WAY: Outer circumstances are in accord to our inner state.

THIS MONTH’S THOUGHT: Choice implies conflict.

LEVELS OF FOOD:   (Excepts from School talk #40 by Dr. Bob Gibson)

When we talk about food we don’t necessarily mean what we stuff in our mouth. However, we’re going to take that one, too.

Food does nothing to the body until it is digested and assimilated, which seems to be done rather automatically and becomes a part of this being when it is assimilated. It may be used as energy. It may be used to repair, rebuild, etc. We are somewhat particular about what we put in here. At least some of us are. We don’t eat tainted things. We don’t eat things that don’t look good, even. The appearance has something to do with whether it is delightful to eat. I could imagine that if I went into a restaurant and ordered a filet and it came out dyed blue, it probably wouldn’t go down very well. And if it did, it wouldn’t sit well, even though the dye was harmless. Blue steaks are just not into our idea of things to eat. The appearance and purity of things is accepted as valuable.

We take in many sensory impressions through the day and usually we pay very little attention to what kind they are. We may go and expose ourselves to a movie that is full of violence and noise and etc. because we have become used to being stimulated. But all that material goes into the person and in many cases it is not digested. Now if you read a book, you digest it. You read an article in the newspaper, you digest it. Or you may listen to television and be doing something else and not digest it very well. And then we have dreams of various and sundry kinds that goes on and dream through the night, I’m talking about night dreams, not day dreams, are basically all based on undigested sensory impressions that you took into yourself which is a form of food. People used to come to me and tell me they would like for me to interpret their dreams. So, I’d listen very carefully to the dream. There’s nothing any more boring to me than dreams, but I would listen to these dreams. And then I would try to reconstruct what that person had thought about, or had been exposed to in the last 48 hours. And you could almost come up with it perfectly that the dream came from this. Now there is a dreamer in there that works very much like the colon does in the body. It’s an elimination organ and so we eliminate by having dreams and nightmares in many cases. If you would just as soon not have that kind of diarrhea, it would be interesting to see what kind of impressions that you took in or paid attention to and some of the more unnecessary impressions most of us could get along without, especially if we’re interested in evolving our states of consciousness. Now if all you’re doing is muddling through and want to get as many stimuli as possible, well that’s all right. But I think none of us here are working on that.

Now another form of food we take in is what the conscious awareness mind, all the Not-I’s, what they carry on with all day. So shall we say, what you’re habitually occupied with mentally is also a form of food that has to be digested and assimilated or gotten rid of. I think it behooves us to pay attention to that kind of food we take in. What is the mental apparatus mostly occupied with all day. Some people are occupied with revenge. Some people are occupied with “showing them”. Some people have a business transaction that went sour. Somebody didn’t do what they were supposed to do or had agreed to do and now the person spends all their time and are totally occupied with how terrible they were treated, how they have been victimized, and how they’re going to get even with that so-and-so that caused all this difficulty and trouble. Now that is a form of food. It is assimilated into the body and it is highly toxic, and it requires considerable adaptation on the part of the body in order for it to continue to survive. Or we can refuse to take that form of nutrient into the body. Now I don’t care how somebody treated me. That is his problem. If he caused me difficulty, it was to his advantage. I don’t have to do anything to get even with him. Life will take care of that very nicely. I don’t have to do a thing about it.

Here is a form or food or nutrient that came into the body that even one look at it would be like eating toxic beef or soured potatoes. You would not knowingly take in a toxic substance for our ordinary food. You wouldn’t eat tainted fish. You wouldn’t eat beef that had been sitting around and got green? But here we read all sorts of garbage in the newspapers and magazines. We listen to it on the radio and television. In other words we take in things that are tainted. Now what do you do with it? Do you digest it and assimilate it? If you do it puts a whole different feeling in your inner state of being. A whole different situation of what you’re aware of. You’re no longer in charge of your inner state of what you will do. You haven’t set up a guardian of the gate that going to watch it. You haven’t organized a state of being that says, “I will be in charge”. Do you think it is harmless to take in violence and lewdness just because it’s there? Do you think it has no effect on you? Or do you see that it has about as much effect or more so, than the stuff we eat?

Now another form of food is activity. We’re all urged to take some activity every day. You ordinarily have an urge to get up and do something because we are impelled to activity. There are activities that are not very beneficial to us. Now if I wanted some distraction I could go down to the bar this afternoon and sit there all afternoon and sip away on margaritas or we could go the peep shows down the street or read the latest Play Boy. But again, those are a form of food.

If you have a suggestion given to you, it’s pretty apt to have some re-occurrence in your head unless you throw it out, now. It is as if you got a bite of food that tasted tainted, what would you do with it? Would you be very polite and go ahead and swallow it? Or would you spit it out? You’d spit. I don’t care whose house you’re in. By the same token, if one refuses to allow this kind of stuff in, one is beginning to build a frame of reference or a new guardian of the gate. The old guardian of the gate is merely the Not-I’s, which take in about everything, but they argue over it. A new guardian of the gate would be a consciously chosen purpose that says, “This is my purpose in life”, and when I run across all these things that obviously have toxic functions coming from it, toxic reactions are going to happen from it, it will never pass the guardian of the gate. It’s rejected immediately. If somebody says what you really should do to feel really wonderful is to have a few snorts of coke. That’s going to be suggested to certain people and they’re going to act on that suggestion and pretty soon they are doing it. But a person with an adequate guardian of the gate, self-chosen, put in place would say, “Not I”. You can get as high as you want. I can get high without it. I can get myself there anytime I want to and I don’t want that kind of a high. We do know the suggestion that all these various and sundry chemicals that people call drugs and dope and what have you has a wide usage. It didn’t come because I had a craving for it before I got to it. It came because of a suggestion that implied that I was missing something very worthwhile if I didn’t use it. And that if I did use it, it would give me great reward. That’s the nature of all suggestion. It has to be implied that there is a penalty for not doing it and a great reward for doing whatever it may be.

The human race is involved in taking into themselves tremendous amounts of things that are harmful to the person, some of which very few people are aware of. People who have studied such things are aware of the harmful nature of many the things taken in, not only in the form of physical food one has, but what the mind is occupied with a great amount of the time and the ideas they subscribe to.

So, if we’re going to have hygienic living, we would first be particular about the food we eat for nourishment of the body. We would be extremely critical of what kind of nourishment we hand to the inner man. At the same time we are building a frame of reference, which is what we live by and what has sometimes been called the SOUL. Man is considered in some esoteric teaching of the Fourth Way that man does not have a soul unless he builds one. And what he builds is a frame of reference, which consists of his purpose and his action upon that proposition until it becomes spontaneous. It is a new guardian of the gate. And that is what is really the person.   It possibly has extreme survival value. A synonym for it would be a self-chosen purpose, which becomes a guardian of the gate. Nothing goes into the mind unless it agrees with that because it sits there once it has been chosen and acted upon. Now that’s what you would call a complete transformation. It is a whole new person. The ordinary person who hasn’t taken the time and effort to build a purpose and act upon it until it becomes nature allows everything to go through. So you could say that there is no interference between Not-I’s or the awareness function and X. If one has taken the activity to build a purpose and acted upon it then you have a guardian between the sensory impressions that come in and X. If this new barrier is there, the keeper of the gate, it doesn’t go through unless it agrees with that purpose. So X doesn’t operate on everything that comes in from the sensory world. It doesn’t get through. It get stopped. It works like the lymph system in the human body.   It keeps toxic stuff from going through, things that don’t agree with the purpose one has chosen. You would say that person has been reborn. They have a whole different way of dealing with the stimuli that comes in from outside.

A STORY:   I continue to realize that I am 100% subject to suggestion 100% of the time. If I’m not paying attention, I get sucked into all sorts of mind games in a split second.

A few weeks ago I stopped by the Chevrolet place where I had bought the car 4 years ago. I wanted them to look at the right rear window, which had a bone-chilling squeak when it was rolled up or down. The shop manager told me he would have someone look at it. I went to the waiting room, thinking that this would not take very long. Probably all they needed to do was to put someone lubricant on the window track. I read all of the latest magazines, including racing car magazines, Field and Stream, and Sports Illustrated, none of which were very interesting. I realized the clock was ticking. I didn’t notice what the hourly shop time charge was. It had to be a least $50.00 an hour. By the end of the second hour I knew the shop time was $100.00 a hour and the bill would be two hundred dollars for a window that I was just as happy to leave up all the time and not use at all. Finally the mechanic came in the waiting room and told me the car was ready. They had to take the door apart and do something to it. The mind suggested this would up the bill to three hundred dollars!

Whoa! This was about MONEY, which was about security, which was about the purpose of living to regain the non-disturbed state. I had allowed that decision to, once again, take over, resulting in anxiety and stress. The illusion of security and a Not-I called fear had stepped in and taken over the inner state.

I stepped up to the window to pay the bill. She told me there would be no charge for the work today. I was speechless.

Life does bring into our experience whatever we need to evolve and wake up. The Teachings suggest that every second is WORK. I heartily agree. It is work to pay attention. However, it is the only way to go from death to life.

I will do the WORK.

IDEAS TO WORK WITH:

1. Let circumstances be.
2. We’re changed as a by-product of being aware.
3. We turn from living from the sensory brain to living from understanding. Don’t take the senses very seriously.
4. If we want to change anything or anybody we have not surrendered.
5. Marriage: Union of X and awareness.
6. When we criticize ‘what is’, we are criticizing Life. We are criticizing balance, X.
7. The whole purpose of existence is to be conscious of what is, without comparing it to some ideal or try to change it. Look at it objectively.
8. Four steps to not be anxious:

1. Nothing is important. All events come to pass. If we all wore clown suits we would all laugh and not make anything important.
2. Two explanations for everything. This is saying we don’t know.
3. Eliminate all sentimentality. If we are to live as human beings we cannot be controlled by sentimentality.
4. See that the emotions of pia, eros, philia, when completed by agape, (understanding, love) are the only emotions that do not destroy us. All other emotions destroy us.

P.S. We have put together 190 of the IDEAS TO WORK WITH, which are all verbatim quotes from the Teachings.   Each one is on business size parchment card in a cute plastic container. If you are interested in them, let me know. E-mail: donnalancaster@hillsboro.net or 254-694-6956.