Phase 1 - January 22nd
Session 3
Links to the Webex recording of the session are available to logged in participants here.
Purpose:
Staying with our exploration of like and dislike we will work toward a deeper understanding of the different 'levels' and origins of like and dislike. We'll also look at the strange contradiction that we have in ourselves of often liking and disliking the same thing at the same time. This fractured and conflicting aspect of our psychological makeup is one of the primary reasons that change and transformation is so difficult.
This contradiction can clearly be seen in our desire to be free of the slavery to like and dislike, and also our extreme resistance to developing that very freedom... primarily because that freedom requires us to become truly responsible for ourselves, without the 'comfort' of being able to blame others.
Approach:
We will continue developing an inventory of our own likes and dislikes, what triggers them, where do they come from, how are they connected across centers, and so on.
Preparation:
A good start would be to create a list of about 100 items. Also, please take a look at this response to a post from Tim .
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Comments
when the dog bites
when the bee stings...did "My Favorite Things" /Julie Andrews/Sound of Music pop into anyone's head but mine last week? Profitable exercise. It started out kind of funny: I discovered I have a like/dislike opinion about just about every event I encounter. Revealing: Other people do too. Frightening: when I am reminded by my reading that when I am liking and disliking I am in the most mechanical part of my emotional center - alarming to realize how much time I spend there. Fearful when like turns to hate. Encouraging to realize there is much more available to us. Comforting to realize by work we can repair the past. (is this what those who profess Christianity mean by "Merciful God?")
Living in the "Reactional Self"
Florence, when you say, "I discovered I have a like/dislike opinion about just about every event I encounter." what you are actually saying goes far beyond like and dislike. What you are saying is that for the most part you are living in the "Reactional Self". This is quite an important observation to make.
Living in a sea of opinions, reactions, judgments, evaluations, etc. often gives people a feeling of actually 'being alive'. Many people live for the next event that will trigger this rush of energy through one of their centers. It can be the emotional center, but it can just as easily be the intellectual center, the moving center or the sex center. It can even involve (although less commonly) the instinctive center... as we mentioned in connection with horror films that are designed to scare us.
What's usually happening is that we over energize one of our centers, usually be stealing energy from the sex center. This over revving of a center momentarily gives us a sense of being alive, of having significance, of participating in life. What we fail to see is that in the long run it uses up our energies on outward appearances and activities, leaving very little if anything to nourish our inner life.
Take for example having intellectual judgments and opinions. When a proposition or new idea is encountered, some people instantly react to it by trying to find some flaw, some misstatement, some error that they can point out. They want to argue with it and 'prove' that it's wrong (if they disagree with it) or prove that those who don't agree with it are wrong (if they do agree with it). They often pride themselves on being able to do this, as though it has great merit. Look at the endless battles over intelligent design (creationism) and Darwinism.
What they are failing to see is that even 'wrong' ideas or ideas that we react to have great worth. In point of fact creationism and Darwinism are two faces of the same dyad, they both contribute to evolution.
By contrast, someone who lives more substantially in the divided self won't waste his/her energies on argument. They might be perfectly willing to 'reason' with someone, but their purpose is to understand, not to 'prove' that someone else is an idiot. They tend not to overdrive their centers with excess energy in order to feel alive... rather they use their available energy to create something more real in the higher worlds.
Still, living in the reactional self is not all bad. When you say that your are living in the most mechanical part of your emotional center, I wouldn't quite agree with that. The material self, and the truly mechanical (automatic) functioning of the centers is a worse hell to live in than the world of reactions. If your primary existence was actually in that world, people would see you as being emotionally dead. Even a moment of reflection on this will reveal what I'm referring to.
So you've helped yourself and all of us with this observation about the Reactional self. Now the challenge is to begin seeing something about the Divided self.
Thanks for that observation
Thanks for that clarification John - sends me back to trying to read "Deeper Man," a struggle for me. Does the divided self contain all three centers and an awareness of them or something that observes them?
What is "selfhood", a "self"?
All of the different levels of selfhood; material, reactional, divided, true; 'contain' or better to say use all of the centers. The centers are instruments, very sophisticated instruments... more like 'employees' than machines in that they have their own will and can act on their own.
The different levels of selfhood are different than the centers... although there is significant overlap. For one thing, all of the different levels of selfhood can and do use all of the centers. But whereas the centers are primarily focused on fulfilling a function; moving, feeling, thinking, reproduction; the organization of selfhood is primarily focused on "experience" in the sense of having experiences, understanding experiences and responding to (creating) experiences.
Analogies can be both helpful and dangerous, but you might think of the centers as workers in some company and the different levels of selfhood as different levels of 'bosses'. It might look something like this:
At each level there is a differing combination of function, being and will. And at each level there is the danger that the supervisor or department head or division manager will start running things for their own purposes, rather than for the good of the organization.
And in many ways that's what has happened to us. Our 'department heads' (reactional selves) are busy fighting turf battles, hoarding resources, or indulging their likes and dislikes; our division managers are busy planning things that will never happen; and our supervisors who are keeping the basic machinery operating are poorly trained and poorly motivated.