We should not reject any part of our experience? Not thinking in terms of rejection more than abstaining from rejection itself. When something upsets your stomach you puke, but you don’t stop eating all together. You don’t develop huge elaborate reasons why it is never ok to puke. How it is a mortal sin to have an upset stomach. We have the reflex for a reason. We have social reflexes as well.

Like these people who explain, “I can’t be hurt again.” It’s a delusion, a lie. They will be hurt again and again ad nauseum. They ignore their social reflexes and make really twisted social decisions. The reason they reject these reflexes, perhaps, is because they would force a redefinition of their self-image, and they have become enamored of their very creative lie, their twisted narcissism. They have so many beliefs that depend on all their judgements being the truth, and all their hurts being exactly what they said they were. Anyone feel like their soul has a cramp?

My tummy has the cramps. Is that the soul? It can mirror it, but perhaps you are hungry? Yes, that too. I need a sandwich. Then have a great sandwich, or even a bad sandwich. It’s all good.

Peanut butter and potato chips. Fascinating sandwich, recipe for thirst, but thirst like everything else about us is not necessarily something to be avoided, nor sought out. When it comes to encounters with ourselves, attraction and avoidance should not figure into it.

So handling rejection is simply managing the social body. Respect your part in it. Just as in nature, most things are not your enemy. In the social ecosystem, most people are not your enemy. Too many predators guarantee a dead rabbit even if nothing ever laid tooth and claw on it. If you would relieve yourself of the social sickness, find the social center, and that center is not in your person as you define it.

Look outside ourselves? Actually, look to no single thing. Your personage is one note in the music. The social heart I speak of is the space between the notes, the pattern that crops up every time you play or are played. Like a pebble being dropped in water, the ripples are as much a part of the event as the pebble is.

Is it in the many roles I choose for myself? It is indeed, and in your ability to make those choices. But more deeply than any idea of thought or planning, it’s ultimately in what has the final say in your behavior anyway.

So essentially don’t take it personally. It lies in the role I play and doesn’t define ‘myself’? Yourself is an absolute fact. Nothing that can be excluded or modified against its nature.

What about when we are children and other children exclude us and make fun of us? As children, we would have been taught adaptive skills if our society were equipped to do so. The shamans stories of shape shifting are perhaps the best metaphor for this adaption. We have to know the inner animal before we can change the inner animal, and when we change the inner animal we come to see the universality of the inner animal. We come to see our inner animal in the outer world. We can take comfort in seeing what are not exclusively our reflexes, but the reflexes of all of life playing out in such a way that serve the best interests of life as a whole.

Then we’d pick the right roles. Like a shaman picks masks. The person viewing the shaman often doesn’t like the mask, is even afraid of it, but no one denies its power because the form was chosen from the inner wisdom.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~