WHAT’S GOING ON? #78 February 2015
ALONG THE WAY: Nothing needs to be changed. All is okay just like it is.
THIS MONTH’S THOUGHT: Peace is not resisting disturbance. Peace is working with what is, not what if. Peace is when I’m quite willing for everything to be as it is, including myself.
WHERE TO FIND TRUTH: (Excerpts from School Talk #55 by Dr. Bob Gibson.)
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 have 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 that we could remove the obstructions to our being a 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 no 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 cell 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 love for everything and everybody, but when it all gets down and there’s a sudden little challenge, we go back to being 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 take 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. 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 good 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 we probably all have is that I don’t have any misconceptions.
(TO BE CONTINUED NEXT MONTH)
A STORY: It would be wonderful to sit back on a nice soft pillow while the earth continues its travels around the sun. However, the Teaching material says that the spiritual life does not become easier as we slowly, but surely evolve. No, we have greater and greater challenges, usually a bit more than we think we can do.
The Not-Is have become more subtle. The resistance I have to any initiated act has become stronger. I can sit in the nice ,comfortable ,blue chair and think of dozens of things I would like to do. Most of the ideas don’t amount to very much and certainly are not important, such as cleaning house, etc. However second force moves in and I don’t do anything, at least not anything the Not-I’s would consider worthwhile. So, it’s a Not-I situation. Inertia is a Not-I that takes over and lures me into feeling guilty is I don’t do something meaningful! Who is to say what is meaningful? There is an old conditioned idea that says, “If you are not doing something, you are wasting time”. Sez who?
Now, I can blame aging and I can blame resistance. I am then immediately back into the conditioned state, sound asleep.
I know that when I place a “should” or “ought” in front of anything that I will have conflict. It is a signal that I am operating from a conditioned idea, a misconception.
Today I will keep the mood up and not make anything important. I’ll have a wonderful holy day sitting in the blue chair and watching the Lake. What a hoot!
IDEAS TO WORK WITH:
- There is nothing to be regretful about. There is nothing to feel ashamed about.
- All symptoms are Spirits way of restoring His instrument to balance. Be thankful for them..
- There are no bad human beings, only conditioned, mechanical, unconscious ones.
- The whole idea of the Teaching material is for man to be aware of what is.
- I owns nothing. I is an observer and reporter only.
- We don’t seek the truth. We look for illusions. When we have seen an illusion
for what it is, we have seen the Truth of the matter. The Truth sets us free.
- Discomfort is a signal that we’re operating from a conditioned idea.
- Read and listen without interpreting. Interpreters are “Not-I’s” on an ego trip to show how smart we are. Read and listen and let the material work on us instead of trying to interpret it.
- The minute something comes along we don’t like, we feel like a victim.
REMEMBER:
YOU ARE HERE IN DISGUISE.
YOU HAVE A ROLE TO PLAY TO FULFILL YOUR PURPOSE.
PLAY IT AND HAVE FUN.
THERE IS NOTHING HOLY ABOUT YOUR SADNESS; IT FEEDS THE LOWER ELEMENTS.
KEEP THE TONE HIGH
DON’T MAKE IT IMPORTANT.
- BOB GIBSON
