Classroom Talk
Fall 2001 Archive
The point . . . in some detail. Posted by The small kahuna on November 21, 2001 at 21:23:07:
This is a great question, thanks, Bruce. "What's the point?"
Let me start by putting it to you this way. Would you rather be sitting here in class with the rest of us now, each of us being at peace within, and all
of us working in harmony together as a community dedicated to learning to live more mindful lives?
Or would you rather be sitting here now feeling the way you are feeling now about Sally, and Sally feeling the way she is feeling now about you, and
about me, and Douglas feeling the way he is feeling now about you, and about Sally, and about me?
I think maybe you can see what I mean in this. The world is not at peace. As the Buddha put it, life is suffering. And this is exactly what he means.
There's not enough peace in the world. There isn't enough peace in each of our worlds. Peace is not the way of the world, as far around the world
as you can look and see, and as close to home as each of you can bring your aware attention on in.
This is NOT a class about becoming "goodie-goodies," so to speak, as you wondered in your post. It is a class about seeking to find and create more
peace in an imperfect world where there's not enough peace.
The point, first of all, is to be free. This one is worth remembering. When what your life is about in a given here-and-now is reacting to what another
person has said or done, your life, per se, is not free.
Do you see what I mean by that? Transformative training is about becoming free. You can look at it as becoming free of the acquired habits of your
ego-driven personality. And you can also look at it as becoming free of enmeshment in the matrix of back-and-forth stingers that constitutes so much
of the suffering of everyday human life on this planet.
So, if you have been given a stinger, and you give a stinger back, you are not free. You are caught in the automaztic habitual habits of the ordinary
human condition. As Gurdjieff put it, you are a robot, a marionette, an automaton. You have no Will. "You cannot DO," Gurdjieff said. Your life is
not in your own hands. Everything for you is a reaction to the conditions that are going on around you.
Reacting, and stinging back is automatic with people. What is not automatic is not stinging back. For that, one must learn to be awake, and then one
must be awake in the moment, so that one has the presence of mind to realize that one is free, know that one doesn't *have to* sting back. There are
other options. And the awareness game introduces many options to the habitual reactions of our automatic personalities.
Another way to look at this is that the point is to learn to live without being at the effect of other people. Because of the back-and-forth stingers that
are constantly going on in life, people wind up spending much of the energy they have reacting to other people's manipulations. In doing this, they are
living almost entirely at the effect of those other people.
Here's a personal example for you, Bruce. Your parents behaved in certain ways with you when you were a boy. Like all of our parents, they
manipulated you, coming from their ordinary ego-driven personalities. Later on, I'd like to show how the ways that they manipulated you (i.e. their
stingers) appear to have resulted in the perfectionism that still gets in your way to this day. In other words, you reacted to their stingers by becoming
habitually perfectionistic. And likewise, you appear to have reacted to their stingers by becoming habitually self-effacing. Reacting to their behavior as
a boy, has left you living at the effect of them in the ensuing years . . . rather than in discovering the course of the wonderful life of your own, and
taking charge of your own wonderful life.
So, living in reaction to other people (don't worry, Bruce, all of us are still doing this in our class) is not a preferred way of mindful warrior life.
And, by the way, not living in reaction to other people does not mean not liking them, enjoying them, caring for them and loving them. Being free of
enmeshment this way doesn't inhibit personal relations. On the contrary, it makes caring companionship with other people far more likely and
attainable.
For another point, stinging back doesn't work. It doesn't work, that is, if what a person is aiming for in their life is having peace within, and harmony
in relating with others and the world around. Stinging back, nearly always, results in getting stung back yet another time. If stinging back would put
a stop to the get-backs, this would be a different story. But ordinary life doesn't work that way.
And sometimes—regardless of how badly you've been stung—when you sting back again, two people sting you back, and sometimes more!
Sometimes a single stinger (however unjust it may seem!!!) will bring a host of stingers back upon one's Self. We live in a matrix of people being rubbed
the wrong way, and stinging back and forth among each other.
The awareness game says there's gotta be a better way than that!
Yet another point: stinging back is an incredible waste of energy. Because of the nature of sleeping human life, most of the day-to-day energy that
people have at their dispostion is *squandered* by "fighting it out" with their parents, their lovers and spouses, or ex-lovers and ex-spouses, their kids,
their neighbors, their bosses and the people they work with, even the people they go out for entertainment with . . . even fighting with strangers like
clerks in stores, unsolicited phone sales people, strange kids in the neighborhood, other drivers in the streets they drive in, etc., etc., etc.
Every one we fight with has their own ego-driven personality—as have we. We cannot expect that they are not going to be rubbed the wrong way
by us. We cannot expect that they are not going to go on giving us stingers (aggressive or passive) in all of their ego-driven personality ways. They
don't know about stingers. And even if they heard about stingers, they would have to learn to wake up in order to do anything about them.
The awareness game is about being able to field other people's stingers, by seeing what they are, and letting them go right through our space without
gaining purchase on our bodies. You *have to be* awake, on the spot, to be loose enough to let stingers go through you without impacting. If you are
asleep, of course, they impact on your body, giving rise to negative emotional feelings, thinking-thinking-thinking, desires to even the score, and the
knee-jerk personality reactions that typically come up in us.
And the necessity for feeling the sensations of the negative emotional feelilngs, patiently processing these palpable tensions on through cannot be
emphasized enough. If you skimp on processing the sensations of your negative emotional feelilngs, you won't be able to extricate yourself from your
patterns of reaction.
That's probably what happened to you with that woman that you got angry at in your office, Bruce. You had enough awareness, enough presence of
mind to step aside from lashing out at her. And that was an accomplishment in itself. But you may have "skimped," so to speak, on really processing
the feelings of the anger in your body. And I'd guess you must have been pretty angry at that time. So you still had all those tensions stored up in
you when you went to bed that night. And later, as you recounted, you had that remarkable angry nightmare.
I'm not an expert on dreams. But I've heard it said that one of the functions that dreams can serve is as an arena for the body letting off huge
accumulations of emotional tensions that have come up. I wouldn't be surprised if that explains what happened to you that time. You "started the job"
of getting off the habitual pattern of angry reprisals, and your body took over and finished the job of letting off all that unprocessed anger in your
dream. Does this compute for you? It's only "an educated guess" on my part.
Getting back to this thing about squandering energy by living at the effect of other people
And this does not mean one can't "stickup for themself" when they are stung and wounded, either. I wish you could see already how powerfully,
how completely, and how "satisfyingly" Deirdre stuck up for herself when she responded to Lou the other day with just that "Hummmm." There are
all kinds of ways in the awareness game to "stick up for oneself." And all of them have to do with checking in to find what one's actual experience is,
and then speaking the truth about that.
Even "I feel angry!" is a better communication than "You're a jerk!" It doesn't take a judging stinger to tell about the way it really is. The weapon of
the mindful warrior of peace is the skilled expression of truth as one is experiencing it. (Check out that page of Non-Manipulative Candid
Communications in the wheelbook in the Playground, for a list of ways that a mindful warrior for peace can ask for *anything he or she wishes for*!)
If all the energy that is squandered by giving stingers back to the people we are living at the effect of were saved . . . . . all that, or as much of that
energy as can be saved, is still *in us* to be invested in taking intelligent strategies for working on the things we each are interested in, and like, enjoy,
and love. According to the awareness game, at least, this is a better strategy than living enmeshed in a system of back-and-forth stingers.
If all the energy around the world that is now being invested in evening scores with other people who've stung us were to be redirected, for just one
day, into investments in the things we like and we love . . . . . I think everybody on this planet might get the point.
And what about the "evil-doers?" Don't we have to get even with them? The strangest thing of all, perhaps, and the least comprehensible to ordinary
human minds, is that the answer to that is "no" . . . . . . at least, not in the ways we human always seem to go about it. If it enters our livingroom, we
have to deal with it bravely if we can. If it enters our country, we have to take the call. But we don't have to *take it personally* the way we all seem
to do.
How can I explain what I mean here? All of our adversaries defeat themselves by going too far in the excesses of their personalities. If we do not lift
a finger "helping them" defeat themselves, they will defeat themselves anyway. Defeat is built into the excessively ego-driven way that they are going
about things.
Take the Taliban/alQaeda as a mini-nation. We all know of the many, many ways that they have "gone too far." They have gone so far that they
have collapsed. They have imploded. The majority of the people that they controlled before, have disappeared, or have even turned against them.
They went so far in so many excessive ways that eventually, they had to collapse.
Notice the truly amazingly laid-back military campaign that the U.S. has waged against them. (Not a single U.S. soldier has been killed in the war so
far!). The U.S. strategy has applied some awesome pressure, but without the wholesale kind of scorched earth way that we are quite capable of in
terms of "making their defeat happen." We have been more sparing, than going too far. And we have let the rest of the whole situation there play
itself out. The dictatorial terrorist structure has caved in.
What I'm trying to say is that we can be as sparing of our adversaries as we can be in the daily events of our lives. We don't need to burden
ourselves with the idea that unless we even the score with them, they will go unpunished, and the world will be "left out of balance," so to speak.
We don't have to sting our adversaries back—an eye for an eye—so they will be punished and "justice will be done." And the reason for that, the
esoteric reason for that, is that . . . . . our adversaries are already their own punishment. In the excesses they do, they bring their own punishment
back upon themselves. (And so do we, if we don't go to some kind of transformation classes, and keep awake!)
As long as we keep stinging them back, the final Fate of their excesses is *forestalled*. We keep their cycle alive by stinging them back. A little more
"evil" will come back upon us again. (In the case of the Afghan combattants, in the next generation of their children is the way these constantly
perpetuating wars go on and on in our world. The automatic, unconscious, spring-loaded energy for evening the score can go on and on in
nationalistic mobs, for generations and even for many, many centuries. You all know what I mean. Eon is looking at precisely that, in his part of the
world. Rakesh is just across the border, his nation caught up in these same cycles of stingers back and forth. So many nations around the world are
caught up in this very dance.
Our adversaries are their own worst enemies. We don't need to punish any other person, because they—in the excesses of their own personalities—
are already their own worst punishment.
Playing the awareness game is a method that can help any of us who wish for it to get off of being our own worst enemies and into freely living the
full rich lives that we have been given, instead.
>I've been watching my reactions to the posts by Sally, Lou, and others and what is coming to awareness to me is how when I'm hurt by others I automatically MINIMIZE the pain because after all to my subconscious mind --painful bullshit is after all "openly to be expected."
Good insight! If you minimize the pain, you may skimp on processing the experiences of the pain thoroughly. Because the pain is real. Painful bullshit
is to be expected. And that means pain is to be expected. And you have to "eat it" awarely, before you are free to "just be space" to the stingers in
life, and let them go right on through you without "gaining purchase" on your body . . . without you clutching up around them, creating pain.
Learning to let stingers go right on through this way is an art form. And if they get to you, while you are learning to practice this art . . . well, you've
just got to experience it, and process the pain on through. Eventually, by practicing this, as one becomes more and more mindful, one can get quite
good at not offering resistance to stingers, and letting them pass right on through.
I think this practice is what Jesus was referring to when he said, "Resist not evil."
>Should I just act as if the stinger Sally gave me didn't hurt?
Not at all! That's exactly the thing to communicate, instead of stingers. You can share your own experience without attacking. You know, if you had
only responded to those moments of pain out loud here in class by saying . . . "Ow!" . . . . . and not a word more, I think you might be surprised at
how effective that would have been in the circumstances.
In your last remarks here about Sally . . . "pedal to the metal," or whatever you said, that went over my head. I couldn't tell if that was another
stinger or not. I don't know how that was received by her. The point here is that these additional edgy remarks *might have* rubbed her the wrong
way again, making it all the harder for her to feel contrite about everything that had happened.
For you were characterizing her in those phrases, which is a kind of judgment per se, and it doesn't take into account what her experience is being.
How about sharing what your own experience is being? That's what *works* the best! In times of stress, the best communication is not telling the
other person who *they* are being, but sharing with the other person who *you* are being.
Again, "Ow!" would have been the best communication I could think of (as a coach), because it would have been the truth, and would have conveyed
much phenomenological meaning without keeping the issue alive in a context of dispute. For nobody can argue with "Ow!" if that is your experience,
and everybody knows what it means. But all people *can do* with a judgment is go on arguing about it.
The ultimate key question in all this is whether a point can ever be reached where you can forgive Sally, and where Sally can forgive you . . . . . so that
we might mingle together here in class again for one day in peace and harmony, and see what that's like by comparison.
And it's NOT just about paying lip service to these things—not at all! It's about learning how to discover real contrition in our Being, how to discover
real forgiveness, and yes, how to discover the real experience of love.
In a world cluttered up with so many painful knee-jerk-reaction stingers going back and forth all the time, it ain't easy.
......................................................................
It wasn't that you were "persona non grata" around here, Douglas. It's only that this is a school, and I am a coach coaching (a "phony," if you'd like).
It was your own free choice—even as you've expressed it so clearly again here now—not to create a space for me to be doing that coaching work here
with you. I honor that, so I won't.
Best wishes to you anyway, good fellow. I was pleased—even in these contentious circumstances—to hear your colorful voice again for once by
surprise.
........................................................................
About Thanksgiving Vacation . . .
Before the dawn, I'm off to the beautiful country to be working for awhile, good Folks. I'll be back here next Monday, or maybe Tuesday, if I need a
day off. Happy Thanksgiving to you All!
Peace. — {"V"} — Peace and Harmony . . . if you can.
Coach
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