What’s Going On #82
ALONG THE WAY: We are in charge of where we put our attention.
THIS MONTH’S THOUGHT: Where we put our attention may possibly be the ONLY thing we are in charge of!
THE FOURTH WAY: (Excepts from the tapes THE FOURTH WAY by Dr. Bob Gibson)
We have an awareness function and there is something we refer to as X or Life or Spirit, or you can use any word you’re comfortable with. As long as a living being is around it’s there. And when they are no longer living, it’s not there, whatever It is. And the awareness goes along with it. And there is a body which is the mechanism that carries it out. To make it somewhat easier to look at, let’s say the awareness is what says I. X is Life. And let’s say you have a perfect partnership going. You’ve got a partner. Now if you were in business of some sort or other and you brought in an order, it doesn’t matter what the order was for, and your partner could always deliver without bothering you at all about it, would you take on that kind of partnership? You bring in the ‘what’. That’s what I does. I says ‘what’. And your partner takes care of all the ‘how’. You don’t tell him how to get the car out of the ditch. You merely say, “This is what the deal is”. And the deal gets taken care of. Would you join in that kind of partnership? Most often we don’t believe we have this partner. We don’t really see that It works with us every day. Say you go eat a ham sandwich. You merely see what you want to do. You don’t know how to do any of it. The partner takes care of converting, transmuting the ham sandwich into you. You don’t know how to pick up a glass of water and drink it. You don’t know how to stand up. So you have this every day of the week that you decided, “I’m going to stand up” and immediately your partner takes care of all the effort. So when you say, “I’m going to do___ whatever it is, X takes care of the whole show. It will do it all. Now it will keep putting little pieces in front of you and you keep saying ‘what’ all the time, but it goes, if you will go along with it. Doubt rises up almost constantly. Some man said that anything you say and didn’t have a doubt, it would happen. So, if you could see the ‘what’, the how gets taken care of. Except that we don’t want to be responsible. You have a partner who can carry out anything you say you want to do without a doubt. But if you feel like you have to know how to do something before you do it, you will be very limited and function far below our potential or capabilities.
Now your partner will not change places with you. It will not take care of the ‘what’ and you take care of the ’how’. You see mankind for ages has been trying to turn the world upside down. They have always been hollering to the Power that they recognize as being superior, “You tell me what to do and I will do it.” And of course they’re ignored because that is your responsibility. So you can’t upset the partnership by trying to turn it around. Man is always wanting something to tell him what to do so he won’t have to be responsible. But we are responsible. It is a contract solid and it’s not going to break. And if you don’t want to play with it, that’s fine. But that is the way the contract is. You can use it as little or as much as you like, but you can’t break the contract.
IDEAS TO WORK WITH:
A human being is a point of awareness. Look at events objectively, not subjectively.
A conditioned person is a dead person.
Just because we feel something doesn’t make it true. If we let feeling control us we are on the way to the grave.
Tolerance is pride.
A quiet mind is impossible if we are making anything important.
Everything in the conditioned picture of man is hypnotism. All our work is to get out of this hypnotic trance.
If you want to be safe and comfortable, forget about regeneration.
Joy is watching this Great Intelligence handle every situation.
All we can do is report what we’re sensing. That is being obedient to our nature. Our purpose is to serve Spirit by interpreting the senses. We are disobedient to our nature when we judge.
Non-disturbance is a by-product of being free to experience.
There is life between the womb and the tomb.
If our attention is not on this moment, our awareness is fragmented.
Four steps to transformation: Surrender, confession, repentance, new man.
Life is always trying to wake us up. We are all dead until we wake up.
When we say, “I’m sick, I’m tired,” we are taking the name of the Lord in vain.
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. ($15.00 covers the cost of them, including mailing) If you are interested in them, let us know. We have also finished another 190 cards. E-mail: donnalancaster@hillsboro.net or 254-694-6956.
A STORY: I had just emptied a quart of mayonnaise. The sudsy, hot, water cleaned the inside of the jar. I spent the next 20 minutes removing the label from the outside. This required a razor blade, paint thinner and time. Finally I wake up enough to realize this effort was entirely mechanical. I already had a whole shelf of jars which would never be used. And I was getting ready to add this one to the worthless collection.
What was going on? Mother was a jar saver, as well as saving string, bits of aluminum foil and paper sacks. She always removed the labels from the jars. I bought this insignificant suggestion and for years have been living from it.
If these tiny suggestions are in control of my behavior and I am too sleepy to catch them, how powerful a conditioned idea must be that is packed with emotion. The Teaching Material provides us a way to be free of the conditioned ideas. We continue to observe self. This means if I have a glitch I had better look and see what is there that I need to look at. If I am uncomfortable, what conditioned idea is operating. What erroneous idea is at work when I feel dislike for someone or I am irritated by something? It is all inner work. The emotions or sensations come to the conscious level for me to look at if I am paying attention. They are gifts.
All of the conditioning is based on the infantile decision that the whole purpose of living is to regain the non-disturbed state. I have found it helpful to engage in some intense work in this area. At one time I spent weeks writing down and re-evaluating all the reasons why this first erroneous decision would not work. Every morning I went over this list again and again, reporting the insanity of it all. As Dr. Bob told us, “Every inch of the spiritual life is WORK”.
I must watch the self and catch the signals as they arise or I’m dead.
WHY THE STUDY OF MAN INSTEAD OF HIS PROBLEMS? (The Science of Man Teacher’s Course #1 Page I)
Man is continually looking for solutions to problems, believing that when his problems are solved he will be at peace. Although one cannot deny the value in the “problem –solving” approach, it is rather obvious that the peace man hopes to find seems to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There is another approach to peace of mind which is to truly understand man, himself. The reasons are as follows:
Man usually begins with the assumption that his problems are assigned to something outside himself, thereby failing to see the real nature of the problem.
Man thinks that he has free will, doing only that which he has consciously chosen to do. He fails to recognize that due to prior conditioning, he compulsively reacts to most life situations, thereby being like an automatic machine.
Man thinks he knows his motivation or reason for doing what he is doing, when most of his motives are hidden from his conscious awareness. What he recognizes as his motives are often his rationalizations and justifications in the form of blame or excuse.
Man is convinced that he has rights and many of his problems arise from needing to defend or use his rights. In this way man is in constant competition and conflict with what others are convinced are their rights.
Man feels threatened with those who do not agree with him. He feels so pleased with that which does agree with him that he gives up his freedom, serving as gods that which makes him feel right.
Man believes that when he senses something to be so, it must really be so, even though there is constant evidence that the senses are very inaccurate.
Man thinks he is always aware of the factors which effect his thinking, yet is constantly subject to suggestion, illusion, and delusion. Thus he thinks irrationally in a rational way.
