WHAT’S GOING ON?    

#134 October 2005

ALONG THE WAY: 

We write our own script.

THIS MONTH’S THOUGHT:

If our feelings are hurt, we are playing the victim role.

WHERE TO FIND TRUTH?

SCHOOL TALK #55

A very wise man I knew one time told me never go out looking for truth because you wouldn’t find it.  He said that you might turn lots of rocks over, but all you’d find was bugs and worms and what have you under there and so he didn’t see much use in that.  He said if you wanted to find truth, that you would go look for a misconception and you would no doubt find lots of them available.  And if you saw a misconception for what it was, then you’d see the truth of the matter.  And when you begin to see the truth of the matters of everyday living and all the things around you and the way you live and exist each day, that removes the obstruction to Spirit working within you and when Spirit works from the inside to the outside, that’s known as Truth, with a capital “T”.  Truth is a synonym for Spirit, or for Essence, or for Life Force, or what have you.  When you have found the misconception and have really seen it for what it was, you had then truth with a little “t” and when you have dug all that off, you have removed the obstruction to Truth with a capital “T” expressing through the person.  So, I began to look for misconceptions.  Well, I found there were great, great many of them that all of us had accepted as fact all the days of our life and we had lived with them without knowing about them.  So, I set about trying to make them conscious and simple at the same time.

So I took a lot of these misconceptions that people live by every day of the week and tried to simplify them so there wouldn’t be a whole bunch of them.  Because a lot of them are hard to remember, so we came up with a very few.  And if we got these three really looked at some day while we were not in some extremely stressful situation, we could remove the obstructions to our being very conscious, awake individual, one which Truth was expressing through us, rather than I had went out and found something.

Truth is always here, but it’s usually covered up with a bunch of stuff, so we went to work to find out what it was covered up with so you could dig it off.  If there was a treasure in your back yard buried away, nothing you have to do with the treasure, you dig the dirt off and the treasure is there for your use.  And so this is the dirt we wanted to look at.

So, the first one of these big misconceptions that comes along that everybody holds to be true and not matter how much you learn, how much you memorize, how much you read, as long as this one is still there, whenever you’re challenged, it’s going to act up first.

The first big one is:  I’m a victim.  Now, as an infant, we all started off feeling we were victims of all these big people around, a victim of all these sensations, things that hurt us and things that annoyed us and things that prevented us from having every little thing we wanted.  So, we became very solidly with a conception, which was a misconception that we were victims.  Now, if you have a misconception, sooner or later you’re going to have a false feeling of emergency, then you’re going to be in a state of chemical imbalance and neuromuscular tension.  Then, you’re going to have to have adaptation, either in the form of unusual cellular activity, unusual sensations, tissue alteration or breakdown, or unusual behavior, one or the other to burn it up.  Each of these being very uncomfortable gives us a further reinforcement of the misconception that I’m a victim.  So, most of us live in something we refer to as the vicious cycle.  We live there most of our life.  Now we learn a bunch of things and we can talk very learnedly and very holy and righteous about all our goodness and all of love for everything and everybody, but when it all gets down and there’s a sudden little challenge, we go back to be a victim. A victim reacts one way or another, either by hiding, being fearful, upset, nervous, or getting very angry.

So, if we can really look and see that I’m not a victim of anything. Now, it‘s one thing to say that and it’s another to sit down and really discover that I’m not a victim.  I’m not a victim of the way people treat me.  I’m not a victim of circumstances.  I’m not a victim of anything that you could come up with and conceive of.  I’m not a victim. I’m not a baby anymore.  We grew up somewheres along the way.  And we no longer could say we are a victim.  Now this is one of the most firmly implanted misconceptions that everybody holds.  The minute something comes along you don’t like, you feel like you’re a victim.

I’ve sold a lot of things in my life, but the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to sell anybody was that they were not a victim.  That’s the hardest sell I’ve ever tried to make.

You can go out and look anywheres you want, you can see it, the best place to look for it is in #1.  We have convinced ourselves that we are victims and therefore, when we get down to consciousness, it can’t get out.  If you feel you are a victim, every bit of information that comes in is going to prove that in some way or other you’re a victim.  It’s going to be the way people treat us.  It’s going to be the weather.  It’s going to be the economy.  It’s going to be the government.  It’s going to be health problems.

Here is a misconception that I highly recommend that each person that a good solid look at and discover that it is a misconception, not a fact.  About everybody; without knowing it, unconsciously at least, believes they’re a victim.  It’s been there so long you just take it for granted and go on.  If I’m not self-determined, then I convince myself that somebody else is determining everything I do. I would have to say that I’m other determined, rather than self-determined as long as I consider myself a victim.  Whether I blame friend husband, friend wife, friend children, friend government, or the system, that’s a good one.  See the misconception for what it is, then you’ve seen truth.

And it’s the only way you’ll ever find truth.  I’ve met people who tell me they’ve been on the path searching for the last 44 years and they haven’t found the truth yet.  But they’ve got gobs of misconceptions they wouldn’t dare look at, because they’re sacred cows, you don’t touch those.  Possibly even greater than the misconception I’m a victim, is I don’t have any misconceptions.  That’s probably the biggest one.  (To be continued next month)

A STORY

There are times when I feel, oh, unsettled.  I have an uneasy feeling, which I blame on age, the weather, lack of sleep too much sleep, hunger, too much food, not enough exercise, too much physical activity, too tired, and on and on.

When I look closely, I usually find that his unsettled feeling comes from having something before me to do that I don’t know how to do, I don’t want to do or I don’t know what the outcome will be.  The self (ego) does not like to “not know”.  When the self thinks it knows, it feels safe, or we could say more comfortable.  If my purpose for living is still to be comfortable, I can easily fall for the suggestion that it is important to KNOW.   Of course, this is a misconception, an illusion.  The reality is that we cannot know the outcome of anything, nor do we know how to do anything!

I deal with this every month when it’s time to start each letter.  It would seem that after doing this for 12 years that it would be a slam-dunk to put this together.  But no, I have no idea of what to put in it or where it will go.  The ego doesn’t like this kind of wishy-washy approach.

So, what are the facts?  The awareness function has only two things it can do:  To report accurately (free of conditioning) to X what is going on and the value of it.  X knows how to do all the work.  Not only knows how to do it, but does it.  What a deal!  How could I ever feel anxious or afraid if I really know this to be true?  I just forget.

I will remember.

THE 9-STEP JOURNEY   by Dr. Bob Gibson

The study to evolve to the possibility of higher consciousness, enlightenment, wisdom and understanding and many other verbal attempts to label the natural state of man has been called “The Path”, “The Journey”, “The Pilgrimage”, etc., etc., all implying a trip from one place to another area, such as from the conditioned state of being to enlightenment, from a very unnatural state of being to the natural state of being, which is so unusual that it is sometimes referred to as being almost supernatural.

As a possible aid to this journey, the following major places on the journey are given:

1. THE WORLD. The starting place for all.  The world of belief, emotions, material purpose, conditioning, mechanical reaction.
2. CHALLENGE FROM LIFE: Major disappointment, losses, major illness or accident, feeling that life has not meaning, etc.
3. SEARCHING OR ASKING. Usually asking amiss for something to produce a sense of non-disturbance.  Perhaps the real search and asking would be something like, “What’s going on here?”   If the asking is for a real purpose, not as conditioning, the Way is opened to one.  There’s an old saying:  When a person is ready, a teacher appears.
4. SELF-KNOWING: The study of conditioning.
5. SELF-REMEMBERING. What am I?  Where am I?  What’s going on here?  What can I do?
6. INITIATION: Practical acting on “What can I do?”  Learning in spite of conditioning.
7. DEDICATION: Making of first value; LIVING self-remembering.
8. Higher states of consciousness and unconditional love.
9. A way of saying “Thank you”.  It could be said that the traveler learns to serve, NOT TO GET something.  However, service does have side effects.

*****

A mouse trap placed on top of your alarm clock will prevent you from rolling over and going back to sleep after you hit the snooze button.