Classroom Talk
Fall 2001 Archive
I sense I heard a buzzer going off. Posted by John on November 15, 2001 at 14:08:02:
Gee, I hope, after all these semesters of training, that everybody in class heard the starting buzzer of the awareness game going off, even you
newcomers, Rakesh and Bruce. Stop and reflect. You can *know* existentially that there's tension in the air here in Classroom Talk. You can *feel it*.
Do you all see what I mean?
And there was a stinger voiced. You can see it, in slow motion, traveling through the space of the arena we are all viewing here.
It is obvious and apparent that there is score on some scoreboards around here. In fact, not only is there score on the scoreboards of those who are
speaking these words, there is score on the scoreboard of all of us who are following along here. Because . . . words in space have impact. And we all
react to their impact with emotional feelings, thinking, desires, and habitual styles of personal behavior.
Now, you asked more or less the same question that I had, Lou. "Is there more to this message?" so to speak. But that was not my own first pause,
when I started playing the awareness game here.
Actually, my first reaction was to laugh (I was angry without knowing it, and letting that anger off with a laugh!). My first thought—I remember it
clearly—was "Well, I guess it wouldn't be Classroom Talk without another engagement going on."
Notice that's a kind of sarcastic thought, which fits, precisely, with the anger I was experiencing then. I heard the music of my anger when I saw that
thought as it popped up. I turned my awareness inward, and I felt the anger in my face. There was score on my scoreboard, all right! ;-)
And then I woke up further and realized that the starting buzzer had gone off. And—being in here behind these eyes, awake to my body within,
and knowing I was only having an emotional feeling, my first realization was . . . . . . that you were really hurting then, Sally, as you were writing
those lines. I didn't know much of where you were coming from so far. But I realized that you were really hurting.
That's the central point I'd like to call the class's attention to here today, please. Whenever you wake up and realize there is score on the scoreboard,
try to remember this: any person who is throwing stingers into the space is *hurting*.
You can know this, and understand this. The spouse, co-worker, friend, etc. who is stinging you is HURTING. This is so valuable to realize this.
And when you are stinging another person, you are hurting. It is this hurting which gives rise to the stinging. And it is this hurting (in bound-up
energy of the muscles that are tightened within the body, tightened into the characateristic groupings of bodily tensions that we are studying here as
fear, loneliness, anger, jealousy, shame, anxiety, sadness, and guilt . . . it is this hurting which supplies the physical energy to the acting-out of stinging
that takes place.
This applies, for instance, to that time you were being angry with a co-worker the other week, Bruce. And it applies here now in Classroom Talk.
The bound-up tensions of the negative emotional feelings are the energy that drives the actings-out of the ego-driven personality. So, in this
engagement, Lou, if you were to be able to take this into consideration, from the start, when you are first replying to Sally—if you were to be able to
realize, "My schoolpal Sal is really hurting here."—would that not perhaps be valuable for you to know in deciding the way to respond to her?
Now why would I, the Coach, have gotten angry about this? I'm not angry any more, thankfully. People get angry when something is wrong, when
things break or don't work right. What wasn't working right in Sally's posting for me?
Well, it's not the mere fact that there's a stinger in it. That's nothing new around here. Most of us have exchanged stingers (either aggressive or
passive stingers) at each other around here in the past. You newcomers will get used to this vigorous byplay in class, I hope. There have been
engagements like this in every semester from the very beginning. In fact, the first engagement we ever had was when I came off the wall about
something Deirdre and Perk were discussing in the first semester. I became contrite about it later and apologized.
Stingers will go on happening around here as long as this school lasts. The best we can do is learn off of it. Classroom Talk is a microcosm of society
all around. And wherever and whenever any groups of people get together, those people each have their ego-driven personalities, and in the course
of their conduct together (whether it is a spiritual school or the corner clubhouse) what we see, in truth, is that people with different personality types
*rub each other the wrong way*. It can't be helped. It happens wherever humans are gathering. It happens here. Because of the different
personality types we each have, we rub each other the wrong way.
It is out of this matrix of different ego-driven personalities rubbing each other the wrong way that these stingers emerge, and engagements happen.
And this is precisely what we are here to study.
By the way, Rakesh and Bruce, Jeff coined the term "engagement" as a gentler and more realistic context for this phenomenon. I used to call it
"personality war." An engagement, in the awareness game, is where one person's personality has unknowingly rubbed another person's personality
the wrong way, and the other person reacts with a stinger. And a stinger, in brief, is wounding words, and other wounding acts that get back at
another person for rubbing one the wrong way.
Oh yes, what I was angry about—briefly, and I've processed it awarely and I'm cool now—is that it's really, really important for me right now to *
complete* the series of classes that I'm doing here with Bruce's sharings. So anything that comes up in life that seems to get in the way of that becomes
judged by me as "wrong," so to speak. Do you see what I mean? It's the first chance I've ever seemed to have so far here in Classroom Talk to really
demonstrate how to use the personality and essence wheel, step by step, by walking all the way through the patient process of putting that jigsaw
puzzle together with Bruce. When we're done with this task, it won't be my hunches that prevail, but your own clear view of what's obvious and
apparent to you, Bruce.
And I've tried to make plain that this work I am doing with Bruce is for the benefit of everybody who's interested in learning how to use the
personality and essence wheel. Psychotherapy may aim to have a person recognize only their own chief self-defeating patterns and work on them.
But in a training like this, the aim is for all of you students to be able to recognize all the major self-defeating patterns around the wheel . . . . . so that
you can understand not only your own Self, but all other people's Selves, as well.
When somebody is hurting here in class, that takes a high priority with me. I'd like to know more about what you're hurting about, Sally. If you're
willing to share about that, that's my response to you. It's more important to me to find out what you are hurting about now, than it is to proceed at
once with the piece of coaching work that I'm getting to do with Bruce.
Coach
The posting I'd been sketching out to post now was titled "About Life and Death."
I was going to respond to Jeff's mantra "I'm alive," Sally's posting of Father deMello's surprising exercise in a coffin, "I'm dead," and Lou's fine sharing
of the ways he is adapting awareness game training to his life, walking around "with Lou." Well, I"m supposed to be on a diet of giving you approval,
Lou. Heh-heh. I hope you felt proud of that long class you composed without me, on your own!
Briefly, it came to me that Jeff's mantra, "I'm alive" is the most basic mindfulness mantra of all. Where various teacher's have adopted their own words
for describing it, awareness, aware presence, being present, being awake, mindfulness, self-remembering, etc.. etc., and I have come to think of this as
"the field of mindfulness training," I could, as well, think of this field as "the field of being alive." I could have called my training the "I am being alive
training." And we could be playing the "Being Alive Game" here in Classroom Talk.
Mindfulness is simply *knowing* I am being alive in the here and now. When we wake up within, whatever exercises or trainings we have gotten this
from, the basic knowingness of it is: I am being alive.
When we are asleep, when we are lost in the clutches of our thinking minds, and distracted from the realities of Nature around us and the Being that
is going on within, that is when we are here on Earth but not alive, not fully alive. In ordinary everyday sleep we are only partly alive. When we
"come-to" in mindfulness, we are fully alive.
When we are alive this way, and we feel our feelings, knowing they are just feelings, and we see our thinking, knowing it is just thinking, and we
recognize our ego-driven personalities, knowing it is just ego-driven personality—in just the same way as we are awake to the sights of the sunset, the
sounds of birds that are sounding, the smells of the rain that are smelling, the tastes on our tongues, the feelings of the textures of solid matter . . . . .
we are being alive.
There is a famous saying in many spiritual teachings that all of you have heard before, I'm sure. "Unless you die, you cannot be reborn." To me, and
in this approach, this only means that unless we recognize the falseness of our identification with our ego-driven personalities, and learn that we *can*
let go of our attachment to the divisive attitudes and burdensome habits and patterns of all that funny stuff, we cannot be fully reborn in the basic
natural human state of being alive.
But with transformative work, we can get a start on it, and do a little work on it every day. We can practice non-identification with our negative
emotional feelings and the aware processing of these tensions on through, and non-identification with the reactive things that our thinking minds come
up with, and the aware processing of these Self-defeating reactive thoughts on through.
If we can practice only this, the lessening of the hold on us that each of our patterns of ego-driven personality have, the dissolution of this funny stuff
cannot be far behind, and we are becoming more and more fully alive.
I have to admit I was taken aback by your posting of deMello's challenging exercise the other day, Sally. I might mention to the newcomers that the
"Great Balancer," etc., etc., type nickname that I've had for you over the years has been the Great Finder. I won't get into that here, except to say
that you have always shown a remarkable talent for finding other teacher's teachings on the Internet that "fit right in precisely with what's happening
in Classroom Talk" in an amazingly appropriate way. And (in Las Vegas terminology) you have certainly hit the jackpot this time, as well. I'll get to
that in a minute.
I was taken aback because you didn't say a single word along with deMello's remarks. Not a single word. It was as if, poetically, you were saying,
"I'm here participating, but I'm not speaking to you." And I wondered about that. You'll laugh . . . I *hope* you'll laugh!!! I took it personally, at first.
I wondered if the message was to me, personally . . . "Drop dead."
When I heard your follow-up posting, I knew that you *were* hurting. Go ahead, Seestah. Spit it out! You can tell us. We will understand. What
are you hurting so much about?
Coach
Oh yeah . . . behind the scenes, jackpot surprise . . . I did do Father deMello's exercise in an imaginary casket. I went through the whole routine of it,
bones, dust, and all. And it was comforting to me—strange as that might seem—as I got up, and went outside, and drove through the night to the
wake of an old, old friend. Painter, musician (blues, gamelan), mindfulness practitioner, Christian, student of the awareness game, Rolf died the other
day, completely unexpectedly, more than two decades younger than me.
He knew all the best and all the worst of me over these years. Among other good friends, he was my "male-bonded friend," if you get that picture.
He was the "best friend" I would think of and call up first when I was being really upset or down in the dumps about something—"woman problems,"
often, in years long past. It was always healing for me to share about my troubles with him—the way, no matter what my part in it was being (and
I've never been a saint) he always just let me be me.
And he was the friend I would think of first to call up and share that I had just realized I was being really, really happy all of a sudden, and that things
in my life all seemed to be miraculously working out so well. I would wake up on that beatific state and reach for the phone to call him on the spot. I
did that because I felt it was healing for him to know that even though I'd been down the last time we spoke, I was up and flying again, I was being
fully alive and free.
I'll miss him, that's for sure. And yet, he'll be with me as long as I live. I know him so well, I said to him, before I went on over to the wake, "You *
know* how I hate to go to these things, bruddah!" And he responded, "Don't mourn for me. Get back to your work as soon as you feel inspired to
again."
And armed with the fortifying experience of that bold deMello exercise (I didn't know he did such radical stuff like that!), and my dear friend's
encouraging words, I went to that wake in pretty good shape, and tended to others around me.
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