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Originally Posted by Angela  And if you think (or know) that you have no choice in the matter of your way of being -- that our ways of being live entirely at the effect of external circumstance -- then you're right: you have no choice. (You still have the capacity for choice, of course, but choice doesn't feel available to you.) And all the shades of knowing in between -- as much as you believe you have choice in the matter of your way of being, that's how much choice you have in the matter of your way of being. |
It is the "shades of knowing" that I am talking about, but I don't think knowing and believing are the same thing or have much to do with each other.
Some people in my experience have very little knowing, and limited or no capacity for choice about certain things (and sometimes, about most things). Others choose freely without giving it a second thought. Some people are so addled that it boggles the mind to imagine what it's like to be them. The image that comes to mind is those little clear plastic domes on wheels with a handle that they give to toddlers. They push them along the floor and little balls pop around inside the dome. The insides of some people's heads must be like that. God help them. Is that their fault? Sometimes, to an extent, but often, they seem to be born that way.
Either we are not all created equal, or as the old joke goes, some of us are created more equal than others.
I don't know why this is but I won't disrespect the journey or the pain of others by assuming that it is nothing more than a wrong choice on their part.
I can see how people developed the concept of karma. It's a story that would explain a lot, although in a way that only accentuates the dispassionate, indifferent, impersonal nature of existence in ways that I can't easily accept.
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Originally Posted by Angela I'm interested in hearing about your new expansive phase -- what's going on? |
Nothing that others would find earth shattering. I am just finding some interesting ways to assemble what is left of me into a new configuration that may work well going forward. Maybe in ways that will more than compensate for the sucky aspects, and at the least, will give me a sense of being useful and helpful to myself and others, and things to look forward to.
I believe it's called "picking up the pieces".
As I've said elsewhere, my biggest problem in the past has been caring too much and trying too hard. It has come to me that the things in my life that have always "just worked" (tm) are the things I haven't cared that much one way or the other about. The stuff that has tried its darndest to become an automatic disaster is the stuff that, while I wasn't exactly anxious about it, I did consider fundamentally, non-negotiably crucial to my happiness, the stuff that absolutely had to be a certain way. It turns out that it's amazing what you can live without and what you can do with what is left. It makes me feel like I'm acting out a script written by someone else, which annoys the hell out of me. And yet at the same time, if my script hasn't worked and this one does ... WTF. Might as well go with it. What have I got to lose?
--Bob