Focus

I think all focus is inherently spiritual, and so too are all completed plans.

Much of spiritual work is developing internal coherence.  There has to be a place for spiritual energy to land, and an awareness to perceive it.

I have a book on Psychosynthesis, and the earliest exercises are basic visualizations, like stroking a dog or cat, or shaking someone’s hand, or the smell of pepper or cedarwood, or a blue circle or red triangle.

In my own case, I’ve been doing them when I sit in the sauna.  It’s interesting watching them move and squirm and fuzz and fidget.  If I was aiming a gun it would be doing endless loops.

All this is obviously going on all the time.  As I have said many times, many of my ideas come from running in circles.  This is one of my shelters.  I feel an endless need to run away, get away, and one obvious way is to run from FEELING, right?

Oh, look at me with my pipe and tweed sweater and bookshelf filled with erudition and big words: I’m above all that.

Here is a brain teaser for you: is it possible to be an emotional pedant?  I don’t think it is.  Pedantry amounts to an accumulation of unmoving knowledge.  You cannot accumulate, catalogue and store feelings.  They are like birds that land, stay for a time, then leave, and you may see the same birds a lot, but you cannot control this process, cannot regulate it fully, except by doing your best to extinguish it entirely.  But that is not control, and it dampens the inner fire of life.

If you are going to BE, you can only do it now, and only do it not knowing one moment to the next what is on the way.  And ultimately the only way to do this is complete acceptance and surrender, which of course are the positive, flip side of antagonism and fear.

These are cliches of course.  Words are easy, of course.  But still, it seems to do me good repeating things I’ve heard and read, and doing so with slight alterations, sometimes, and verbatim in others.  I’m working my way to understanding, and quite often the gate to the path is built with words.  The path, of course, isn’t, but it’s quite impossible to finish anything you don’t start.