The intent is to live more, be more, throw off all restraints and pursue your aims without reservation.
I’ve been doing a lot of what I call qualitative work lately, which to the untrained eye would look like me drinking too much while listening to music, then sleeping in. To the trained eye it would also look like that.
To me, though, I am trying to establish a good working relationship between my conscious mind and my unconscious. I am trying to expand the area of free flow within me, flow which is currently constrained by dark areas, by traumas which affect the flow by preventing things from pursuing the most direct path.
Increasingly, I see that my task in this life is be a gateway of flow. My task is to contact heaven, then become a window through which that light flows. This is the Valley Spirit of which Lao Tzu spoke, in which winds flow through you. You are a conduit. This is “baraka” (both Hebrew and Arabic share the word, if I am not mistaken), “darshana”, “Windhorse”.
You can’t do this if some part of you secretly wants to drown little kittens, due to some long ago unprocessed trauma. This is, to be clear, not as far as I can tell one of my fantasies, but is offered in the spirit of exaggeration for effect.
I was looking at a link on “tapping” the other day, which I had not heard of. Here is a link: http://eft.mercola.com/
I was going to try it, then looked at the face of the guy doing the video, and wherever he was, he wasn’t THERE. From this I concluded, rightly or wrongly, that this is a process for getting at external signals, but not deep underlying realities.
There is no easy way to do qualitative work. There is no easy way to heal deep seated trauma, particularly ones going back to early childhood, or on Stan Grof’s account, even the birth process itself. You have to revisit them homeopathically. You have to reactivate the old pain, but within a supportive environment, which in my case means being as kind to myself as I can be.
And it’s working for me. I can feel old, calcified emotions beginning to move, in what amounts to a flow of water through old canyons. This, I feel strongly, is how you contact the light that makes all of us flow, dance, within the universe.
I remember reading some time ago Albert Camus’ “The Plague”. It influenced me. Camus was an atheist, but he always struck me in his later work as someone genuinely trying to do the right thing (unlike Sartre, who I hate).
In that book, he had a man who moved one pile of beans from one bowl to another, one by one, every day. His claim was that that activity was as good as any other (he apparently had retired, or had others to care for him). I would submit that if the activity activated the Valley Spirit, it WAS useful; and if it was done–as seems likely–in a spirit of bitterness and hate, then it ALSO was no different than working a normal job in the same spirit, other than that it did not benefit ANYONE, including himself.
So many people, it seems to me, aggressively move beans from one pile to another, every day. They are out to get rich, or famous, or to gain power. Or they are quietly unhappy, but never do anything to change their circumstances.
There is, in my view, only one real task in this world: to grow spiritually. This growth leads naturally to spontaneous generosity, as you have an overabundance of everything you REALLY need. You are rich, and this leads naturally to charity.
Few thoughts. I really do have work to do, but I get a few days most weeks when I get to do this, and I am grateful.