For all of you who have written with interest about the upcoming Year For The Addictive Mind….stay tuned. I will have many details on both my website and also it will be posted on Byron Katie’s website by the end of this coming weekend.
Even with so many details to finalize, when I awoke this morning, I was thinking, as usual, about the meaning of life, along with when I was going to repair the tear in my coat. Such a rascally rascal, that voice that enjoys figuring things out. As if.
I read a passage the day before where a very old woman who had experienced a truly wonderful and rich life, discovered that at the end of her long days on the planet, she really hadn’t figured out anything yet.
DOH!
All this seeking, learning, analyzing, ruminating, wondering, fascination…it comes and goes in waves of happiness and sadness, despair, grief, ecstasy, joy, peace, fear….all kinds of feelings about everything, coming and going hither and thither.
That big question that Einstein posed…is the universe friendly, or NOT?
Was the little old lady talking about THAT question? I don’t know for sure, but that’s what I was thinking about this morning:
Do I now know, or do I now NOT know, if the universe is friendly?
The usual way of life, for me so far, has been that things are hummin’ along and then something happens, and it gets categorized into Friendly/Not Friendly.
There’s all the reaction, and response, and the A-Teams checking out the casualties (or births), thumbs up, disappointments, up or down…but in the back of the mind a little note-taker who is cataloguing and recording the friendly and not friendly experiences.
I had a Not Friendly experience recently. According to the One Who is Recording In The Catalogue.
And I had to ask myself, as someone who knows the beauty of self-inquiry, what could be the advantage in this situation? I found one, and then another.
It was quite startling, to find advantages so quickly, almost immediately after the Not Friendly occurred.
But then I noticed, it still felt like an emotional blow, like getting hit really hard, injured, damaged, misunderstood. I felt sad.
I felt so very sad, that I had sudden immense, deep doubt in the Friendliness of the Universe.
And then I noticed….in this situation I’m really invested in getting back to positive, to not have to feel so incredibly sad, to manage my wounds.
Positive thinking, finding turnarounds, quickly asking “who would I be without this thought?!” is not The Work if I do it in order to find a good outcome, or get happy.
It’s not The Work if I’m all “QUICK! Remember that it’s a Friendly Universe! OMG Hurry, Hurry, Hurry!”
Trying to make the best of a situation is OK, but it’s not exactly always REAL. It’s not theTruth. It’s trying to impose a positive slant on Reality.
Oops. Remember that quote by Katie..”Argue with reality, and you lose, but only 100% of the time.”
This includes arguments that say that surely, the universe is friendly, when you’re really NOT sure at that particular moment.
I once again realized, when feeling a strong emotional feeling of great grief, that I was judging the actual feeling as bad to feel. The situation, with bad feelings in it, was BAD.
I was trying to draw conclusions from my experience, too, maybe a little too fast. Like a strategy for handling this very terrible situation.
“Gosh golly, this will be a really amazing learning opportunity, this will allow me to practice acceptance of endings/death!”….OR…. “This doesn’t really bother me, I can force myself, surely, into forgetting all about this!”
If someone gets hit by a car, and is lying in the street, we don’t run over to them with blood flowing around them and look into their eyes and say “would you like to do The Work right now?”
This morning, I didn’t do that to myself either.
But now, later in the day….I will. Everything in perfect timing.
“There is no greater misfortune than underestimating your enemy. Underestimating your enemy means thinking that he is evil. Thus you destroy yoru three treasures and become an enemy yourself. When two great forces oppose each other, the victory will go to the one that knows how to yield.”~Tao Te Ching #69
My suffering and grief is not my enemy, that person who did something that hurt is not my enemy, this situation is not my enemy.
Are there ways that this is true? Not lets-get-positive ways. Real ways. Is there anything friendly here? Can you find it?
That’s what I’m talkin’ about!
Love, Grace