Anyone want to share a bit about their own discipline?

I try not to be too influenced by what others think while following my inner guidance. Well, I see a problem with just trying to walk your own path. Even the science behind the brain says that we naturally tune in to each other, tune in socially. We need it for our own sense of well-being. We become confused and afraid if we can experience no rapport at all. It’s one of the complications that exasperates schizophrenia. So why does this link seem to become a problem?

We give up too much of ourselves? We think too much of ourselves perhaps?

Unless we see our place within it all. We try to cultivate an idea. We imagine a place that we don’t actually occupy, or this is often the case.

What I mean is flow, our place, our flow. Ah yes, with sufficient intuition and self-knowledge, finding the courage to put the mask down, and that takes a great deal of courage.

If we stand still anywhere in our life, we are stagnant. Hmm, actually I worry about dynamism for its own sake, the idea that we must always be making some sort of progress. I think it’s what puts people out of touch with their instincts and feelings. That sense of their internal rhythms that might bring more balance to their lives if they could accept that “who they are” is not any of their business. What you are is very much your business. How you are is very much your business. Who you are is a delusion, an illusion projected by others onto you and by yourself onto other people, a social hologram.

Maybe all of creation is a hologram. Oh, it is, but overlap one with another and both wind up looking like noise. I despise noise personally. It sets my every fiber on edge, but I like humanity. I like human beings. I don’t like the dream.

So, there is a gentle way to change this. Waking up to alarm clocks or bright light shining in our eyes only makes things worse. You don’t have to arrive at a personal discipline or “self” and then project that out into the world. That would be like someone throwing stones in a glass house. But as distorting as the glass house is, change the image behind the filter, change the angle and quality of the light, and it becomes more clear that the object behind the curtain is more than you thought it was.

See yourself more clearly? Be yourself more clearly. It’s the effort to see the self that distorts the self, like trying to look at the back of your own head. But the glass house has a foundation, and house plants as well, features of the actual living world beyond, little indicators that at least in small moments you can be present. You can take a breather even if it fogs up the glass. Get really good at finding those living connections, finding the air vents and openings, and it will definitely fog up the glass, not only for you but others as well. You will be doing everyone a favour then, honestly.

When glass is fogged you know it’s there. Yes, and you can navigate around it much easier. But something even more amazing is available to us. The foundation of the glass house has a space you can enter, a basement. You can go into this dark space to feel your core, the life force that sustains you anyway, but the basement is always dark. You always have to bend or you break.

People think everything works like it is supposed to. I see this idea as a horrible lie, really a problem. Everything can fail. Your efforts can all fail. You can be blind and foolish and all things reprehensible. Much strength is to be gained from going in the basement, allowing those moments of being buried. Die a little bit so you won’t die a lot.

All the really effective tools are in the basement. Never look there and you are unarmed and unequipped. How often have we done something with the belief that we knew perfectly well that we could do it? That we ran no risk of error?

Accepting that we have a hair trigger temper and poor impulse control can be the difference between a socially awkward moment, and a self-righteous violent assault on those around us. The ideas people have of competence are what lead the now famous postman to climb that tower and start sniping people around him. He didn’t know a single one of his victims. He couldn’t accept his “failure” so he had to inflict the ultimate failure on others. The failure of heart beat.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~