Constucts and Tapping into our Inclination

Recently I listened to a utube video by Hanakia Zedek. In it he talked about listening to our inclination. I found this an interesting concept. He didn't use the word intuition which we are often told to listen too. I translate intuition into something that speaks to external events, whereas inclination is that which we are meant to do.

We don't really need to know what this is as Hanakia points out, but merely need to be able to listen so as to make the choice that rings true with us. As a flower's inclination is to so we too need to do that which is inherit in us.

Though in philosophical terms this is easy to say, in real terms it is hard to pull off. I believe this is because the constructs that are created by humanity are at their base designed to prevent this from happening. What we think is created by these constructs. They prevent us from seeing the truth, whatever you feel truth may be.

I came to start understanding the concept of constructs and how they influence us by reading Buber (see 6/25/09 post). All life is encounter. I require a you for me. The constructs is how we understand that interaction. But to take it further, if I meet you in the construct I don't see the real you. I see the you I have defined.

For example, look at a tree. For a brief instant when you see it you don't think of it as a sum of parts but as an entity that merges with your thought. But pretty much immediately we break the tree down to its parts, defining the leaves and branches, whether it is an oak or a maple.

This is the construct of the tree. Not the tree itself. Our life is lived in constructs.

So what does this have to do with inclination? I believe that many of our inclinations often run counter with the constructs we have created. Constructs of success or societal norms. Which is why when we listen to our inclination and try to follow it, we find ourselves being diverted to other things. Of course this causes conflict in ourselves.

I know now that I have been waging this battle for years. The way I inherently view life tends to differ from the construct of life I have been taught. I have worked at fitting in, doing things the way the constructs tell me. But I have been finding this increasingly difficult.

My challenge now is to learn to see beyond the constructs and trust my own insight. Guilt, anger, frustration need not exist for me if I can learn to follow my inclination.

And what do I know of my inclination? It certainly is more people focused. I know it has to do with teaching, healing, experiencing. I keep looking for a career, but know the careers are just another construct. Instead of looking for a career, I need to start doing those things that make me feel like I am cruising downhill, instead of running uphill.

Peace all.

Minor Illness

Have been battling for 3 weeks with a couple of different bugs that hit me at the same time. What amazes me is how an illness affects my life. I become More inward focused, less tolerant, and start questioning the quality of life.

Of course this illness lasted a long time and caused me to cut my trip to San Francisco short. Could hardly get out of bed for a week. But still, should one really resort to such a "poor me" attitude.

If makes me think about all those people who are really sick, the elderly who have no one to watch over them battling with aging, all those people who have to live with some disability every day.

How do they keep up hope? How do they look at life positively?

So of course thinking about this I again come back to my blessings. And a deep respect for people who can take a less than perfect health situation and give other people inspiration.

Individuals dealing with long term illness or disabilities have to have a viewpoint on life so much different than mine to cope. I run into a few discomforts for a week or two and complain. Why? Because I don't really see my life as good. There still is embedded in me that need for success. Somehow I am just not good enough.

But what garbage. My life is truly wonderful. Friends, family, health. Is there anything really more?

Yes there is. There is an internal peace that comes from knowing that no matter what goes on in our life, we are alive. That whatever the mystery of life, we are a part of it. We in ways unknown impact those around us every day. We in ways unknown impact ourselves.

I vow to not lose sight of life, its beauty and mystery. I will enjoy it as long as I am living.

Old Rambling Still Applicable

Simone Weil in the book Oppression and Liberty states “Groups manufacture moralities for their own use, so specific activity is placed outside reach of evil. There is thus the morality of the soldier, the business man and so on whose first article consists of denying it is possible to commit any evil while waging war, doing business, etc. One accepts as an absolute value the specific morality of the social group one is a member of. Ones’ mind is at rest, but morally speaking one is dead.”

Simone Weil’s words have been true since the beginning of civilization through to the current day. Be it a street gang, a political party, or a national government, each has its own moralities that give them the right to do things in the name of that morality. Our country is no exception. And as citizens, we have accepted what we have been, as members we have been “morally speaking" dead. But as we awaken from our own personal sleep, we realize that the groups we belong to have the same collective issues, morally dead because the members no longer question motives and actions, but act without thought according to that group’s morality.

Our challenge is how to awaken our nation, our collective ego, and to start influencing policies that reflect a more thoughtful approach. These new policies can’t be based in absolute moralities. They need to be balanced decisions, accounting for the differences of the groups they are dealing with, whether a city, state, or another nation.

Our goal should be to awaken each collective group, to help each become aware that they have been marching in a trancelike state to the beat of the collective ego. At the same time we must use caution not to do the same thing, to judge based on our own view of right or wrong. By awakening these groups each can then start challenging and influencing decisions made at many levels.

Challenge with thought and love, not with judgement.

Week Off

I have the week to myself. What have I been doing? Nothing. How wonderful is that!!!

Retrospective

I decided to take a job this week at Wells Fargo doing pretty much what I was doing before I left for Colorado. It was a difficult decision. It caused me to think about everything that has brought me to this point and made me question if I was falling back toward some place I had purposely left. So I decided to try and summarize for myself where I was, how I got here, and what all this means.

Quite a few years ago (5,6?) I started feeling that I was meant to do more with my life. Many people would call this a mid-life crisis, I like to call it a life awakening. I wasn't afraid of dying or not leaving a legacy. I didn't want a young wife to have children with or a new car to make me feel younger. I simply had a sense, intuitive feeling, that there was something more I should be doing with my life. This wasn't a new feeling. I have had it since I was 15. But work, family, life helped me ignore it.

I decided I couldn't do that anymore. But where could I start? I again felt an answer. Let go. I wasn't sure what that meant, but I started to try and let go of my fears about life and work, family, relationships. This letting go is what finally led me to try AmeriCorp.

The experience in Colorado taught me many things. But the most important I believe is it taught me to recognize and be thankful for the blessings in my life every day. Being caught in the day to day operation of life it was easy to lose sight of how blessed I really was. My parents, family, childhood, education, wife, children, friends, life itself. By letting go I discovered how much I really had. This understanding of blessing led me to many other thoughts. How much we can be in control of how we feel and look at life and the beginnings of a belief in something that binds us all together. When I left Colorado, I felt that I had successfully let go, but my intuition was telling me my next step was to expand.

So what did expand mean? Looking back I realize that I was pushing that definition to what I believe it meant. I felt I had to do more things, meet more people, discover new ideas. But an interesting thing happened. I went back to work. I got caught up again in day to day trivialities and forgot to count my blessings. Expansion became something I would do later once I settled in. I found different justifications for this, but the reality is that I didn't know what to do.

Well, the job offering a few weeks ago pulled it together for me. Another little slap. It made me stop and count my blessings again. At the same time I discovered the Lake Harriet Spiritual Community, a non-denominational, spirit seeking group of people. There are many beliefs reflected there and all are respected.

But what struck me most were the words I heard spoken Sunday that you are not alone. The concept taught in almost every religion that Spirit, God, Nature, is accessible to you always. I understood then that expand meant for me (at least at this moment in life) to expand inwardly, understand Spirit within myself.

And that is where I stand today. I am going to explore Spirit within my own heart and life. I have no idea where that will lead me. But I am more at peace now than I have been in many years. I somehow feel that I have finally put myself in a place that I can actually hear. So does the job at Wells Fargo mean I gave up on my quest. No. I view life differently than I did 5 years ago. And anyway, do any of us really have a choice to give up on our life journey? Eventually it will end, but even that we can't predict. Coming to peace with the twists and turns of our life is really the challenge, not trying to keep the road straight.

Love you all (all 1 or 2 who read this). I hope to write a bit more frequently.

Symbols Revisited

Long ago I went on a symbol kick. I wrote extensively about it though not in this blog. The gist of my idea was that we live by symbols, and judge ourselves by them. Recently I read a piece by Alan Watts in which he stated

"..(we) have for generations confused symbol with reality, money with wealth and peronality (or ego) with the actual human organism."

He goes on to discuss this in terms of the "material" world which we are all part of. By material he refers to earth, air, plants, etc. A much different symbol for materialism then arises.

To continue about understanding ourselves and our relation to the material world he says

"For when the individual is defined and felt as the seperate personality or ego, he remains unaware that his actual body is a dancing pattern of energy that simply does not happen by itself. It happens only in concert with myriads of other patterns -- called animals, plants, insect, bacteria, minerals, liquids, and gases. The definition of a person and the normal feeling of "I" do not effectively include these relationships. You say, "I came into this world." You didn't; you came out of it, as a branch from a tree."

All this has put me back on the path of symbols. How we use them to define ourselves away from the true materialism. I need to think this through some more and determine what it really means. In the meantime I believe I will start examining many symbols I have taken for granted as factual, symbols I have tried to live towards, and question how they align with the "material" world. How they align with our interconnectedness with the earth and each other.

Free Time

Two recent quotes have struck me recently. “We are living longer and thinking shorter” and “what we resist persists”. Both seem to me to talk to the way our society has changed, and how we as individuals feel more stressed in our day to day lives.

We currently for whatever reason feel the need to fit more and more into each day. How often have you sat and thought “I should be doing something with my free time”? The question is why do we feel that? What is wrong with having time doing nothing, or something we really enjoy. Perhaps this is a product of modern society. Imagine 200 years ago, winter, it turns dark and you have no electric lights. You sit by a fire, or in the dark, and talk to your sibling. You don’t read or exercise or accomplish anything in particular. You just do what you can (basically nothing) and enjoy the time in the dark.

Switch to the current day. Given technology we should be able to accomplish something every minute of every day. And if we don’t we wonder what we could be doing. Change is constant, and we constantly adapt, constantly reanalyze where we are at and what we are doing. When we are idle we need to fill in the time with something “productive”. We continually challenge ourselves, and question if we are doing all we can.

This creates a feeling of frustration. And if we believe “what we resist persists” the feeling never goes away, for we constantly create reasons for this. We resist the fact that we may feel best doing nothing. We are to busy, we have too much to do, there aren’t enough hours in a day, and we should be doing something. How about just saying “it’s okay to do nothing”? Don’t resist the fact that we enjoy relaxing, even though there is daylight left.

Once we accept this, the feeling of frustration won’t persist. Skip one day of exercise, don’t read if you don’t feel like it, don’t fill all your hours with activities just because you can. Accept the fact that all hours do not need to be filled.
And enjoy and be refreshed.