| SEEING THE WHOLE PICTURE (Partial Transcript from Group Discussion #146) There are two ways we experience life. One way is an experience that includes an appreciation of where that experience came from; and there's another type of experience you can have, and it might be exactly the same experience, but it does not include an appreciation of where it came from. |  |
One of the reasons why there is a lot of suffering in our lives, is not because of the circumstances or the unsettling feelings that we may have, it has very little to do with that, in fact it may have nothing to do with that at all.
We live in a society that approaches the remedy to stress, or upset, or mental illness with just this one perspective: "I know why you are feeling the way you feel, it's got something to do with your circumstances, something to do with your thinking, and we need to get on top of that. We need to begin to move the pieces of your life around so that you can feel better, or introduce medication so you can feel better, or change where you live - so that you can feel better."
And this natural response derives out of our current way of understanding where experience comes from. "It comes from the outside. The outside, or my genes, or my biology or my past - all these things are responsible, they are catalysts of how I get to experience life in the way that I do."
So naturally, and logically, out of that perspective, there is going to be a philosophy that says there are good feelings and there are bad feelings; there are feelings that indicate wellness and mental health, and there are feelings that indicate mental illness. And you want to have one and not the other.
And that's the current state of affairs.
What we have been doing, and what's so profound for us, is not that we found a new way to feel better, it's that we've gone back to re-examine how we understand what human experience is in the first place.
We are having a conversation, an exploration, a self-discovery, for each of us individually, regarding what the human experience is. What does it stem from fundamentally? How does it work?
And what we ran into were these 3 principles. Over and over again, we saw that the only thing that was responsible for all human experience were these 3 principles. Nothing else, in the most literal sense! Nothing else that we examined, could we honestly say, was responsible for which particular experience was occurring within us.
So the way we found ourselves relating to our experiences, going forward, was that experience is, metaphorically speaking, for all of us, an expression of a Divine energy taking shape as us, and our mental lives, our psychological lives.
This was a huge breakthrough, because, for those evolved in this direction, it ruled out the possibility that anything else in this universe had the power to make us feel good or bad, bad or good. It ruled out the idea that particular feelings were a sign of mental illness. It's also ruled out that particular feelings were a sign of being right or true.
It ruled out the idea that I could enslave myself to a particular set of circumstances, because it will make me feel better. We kept coming back again and again to getting recentred to ... "Wait a minute! I know I've seen (and you've seen) that the way I'm experiencing my life at any given moment, has nothing to do with my life. It has to do only with how I happen to be experiencing my life, through these Divine principles.
And each time we reincluded that fact when relating to how we felt, it set each of us on a different trajectory, a different logic, a different come from, a different way to think about and relate to our experiences. And that, in turn, changed the way that way we responded to our feelings, and it changed the way we responded to other people.
But that's been happening to us on its own. This new relationship is a logical direction that flows from what we have learned about life. And the real leverage has come from appreciating, realising, becoming aware of, waking up to the fact that we are experiencing life through this singular system, this systemic fact, and we've found ourselves reincorporating a knowledge of this system when trying to make sense of our lives.
We've been waking up to that again and again.
We keep pointing back to the fact that there's something bigger going on here. There's something much bigger than "I'm depressed - it’s got something to do with my chemistry, or something to do with the water, or that maybe I'm broken, or maybe you are broken." These terms start to fade away.
Thus two colossal governing needs begin to wilt away in us. One - is the incessant need to mess with our circumstances, so that we can feel better; but better than that - way better than that, is the dissipation of this urge to want to feel differently than the way that we currently do.
That need starts to disappear.
We live in a society that approaches the remedy to stress, or upset, or mental illness with just this one perspective: "I know why you are feeling the way you feel, it's got something to do with your circumstances, something to do with your thinking, and we need to get on top of that. We need to begin to move the pieces of your life around so that you can feel better, or introduce medication so you can feel better, or change where you live - so that you can feel better."
And this natural response derives out of our current way of understanding where experience comes from. "It comes from the outside. The outside, or my genes, or my biology or my past - all these things are responsible, they are catalysts of how I get to experience life in the way that I do."
So naturally, and logically, out of that perspective, there is going to be a philosophy that says there are good feelings and there are bad feelings; there are feelings that indicate wellness and mental health, and there are feelings that indicate mental illness. And you want to have one and not the other.
And that's the current state of affairs.
What we have been doing, and what's so profound for us, is not that we found a new way to feel better, it's that we've gone back to re-examine how we understand what human experience is in the first place.
We are having a conversation, an exploration, a self-discovery, for each of us individually, regarding what the human experience is. What does it stem from fundamentally? How does it work?
And what we ran into were these 3 principles. Over and over again, we saw that the only thing that was responsible for all human experience were these 3 principles. Nothing else, in the most literal sense! Nothing else that we examined, could we honestly say, was responsible for which particular experience was occurring within us.
So the way we found ourselves relating to our experiences, going forward, was that experience is, metaphorically speaking, for all of us, an expression of a Divine energy taking shape as us, and our mental lives, our psychological lives.
This was a huge breakthrough, because, for those evolved in this direction, it ruled out the possibility that anything else in this universe had the power to make us feel good or bad, bad or good. It ruled out the idea that particular feelings were a sign of mental illness. It's also ruled out that particular feelings were a sign of being right or true.
It ruled out the idea that I could enslave myself to a particular set of circumstances, because it will make me feel better. We kept coming back again and again to getting recentred to ... "Wait a minute! I know I've seen (and you've seen) that the way I'm experiencing my life at any given moment, has nothing to do with my life. It has to do only with how I happen to be experiencing my life, through these Divine principles.
And each time we reincluded that fact when relating to how we felt, it set each of us on a different trajectory, a different logic, a different come from, a different way to think about and relate to our experiences. And that, in turn, changed the way that way we responded to our feelings, and it changed the way we responded to other people.
But that's been happening to us on its own. This new relationship is a logical direction that flows from what we have learned about life. And the real leverage has come from appreciating, realising, becoming aware of, waking up to the fact that we are experiencing life through this singular system, this systemic fact, and we've found ourselves reincorporating a knowledge of this system when trying to make sense of our lives.
We've been waking up to that again and again.
We keep pointing back to the fact that there's something bigger going on here. There's something much bigger than "I'm depressed - it’s got something to do with my chemistry, or something to do with the water, or that maybe I'm broken, or maybe you are broken." These terms start to fade away.
Thus two colossal governing needs begin to wilt away in us. One - is the incessant need to mess with our circumstances, so that we can feel better; but better than that - way better than that, is the dissipation of this urge to want to feel differently than the way that we currently do.
That need starts to disappear.
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