Feel with Neil

I am being loved (3) – Moments

My gait halts. Breathing slows, deepens. From my breast swells a transparent cloud, invisible but real and virtually touchable. Mist. It envelops me but is weightless. In fact, buoyant. My ears can hear, my eyes can see, my heart can feel…

I am being loved.

That moment originates within. The divine within. It seems to be the Spirit. Its origin, my soul.

When you lock eyes with mine for a moment, in pure loving compassion and a fleeting completeness of knowing, such moments have no words. It is the fullness of words.

A momentary connection, soul to soul. Being loved by the other. It originates from you. YOU are divine. God loving me. You loving me. The distinction melts to meaninglessness. Mystics call it non-duality.

From within me. From outside of me, from within you, to me…???
See?
No words.

No words, but stark, stark, soul-moving reality.
A fullness of knowledge.
Sacred.

Spookily intimate.
Spooky, but not fearsome. There is no fear in that moment.

Why do we call it a moment? As if it passes? It was the present. Why does the present become the past? Was the moment lost? To the past?

How/why do we conceive a past or future? Only the present exists. Does the past not exist? Does the future not exist? Just because we can conceive them, does conception mean existence? Are they real, or are they artificial conceptions?

Why do we let those sacred moments dissolve?
Or do we not *let* them?
We instead *make* them pass?

Perhaps, more simply, those moments are not up to us?
They are not moments we control?
They are moments given to us.
By what? Your divinity? My divinity?

Do we “snap out of” those moments because they are too much for us? I believe so. Why else does something that seems so fearlessly perfect for a moment not seem fearlessly perfect for an eternal string of moments? Why is it fleeting? What flees? Seems like it can’t be the divinity within us which flees from the divinity of another. But perhaps it is.

Perhaps divinity is always in some kind of motion. Perhaps the Spirit is ever-moving, alive and never still? Then why do contemplative mystics cherish stillness achieved? Is it because, when their whole human persona is still, it is then that they can perceive the perpetual movement of divinity?

[More love letters]

Neil D. 2020-11-28

Shitty blame boardgame

Here’s the game. We each sit on a different side of the gameboard. We all start with an equally-sized pile of blame in front of us. Each time we win a move, we get to move a piece of our pile and “place blame” in front of another player. The winner is the one who places all of their blame pile onto others first.

Piles of blame are piles of shit. At the end, the one who moved the most shit has the shittiest hands. Anybody want to play?

2020-11-24

If you doubt for a single second how deeply and unconsciously ingrained the blame-game is in our psyche, here is a far more tasteful review of its history, starting with religious origins which continue to this day, despite the example of The Cross celebrated by Holy Week.

https://cac.org/a-temporary-solution-2021-03-29/

Most of the article is his own potent synthesis, but Rohr also quotes a Jordan Peterson favorite, Russian philosopher Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

Cold starts in nature’s cathedral. Cheryl

This morning I rose with the sun at dawn. An angel stoked my heart with tenderness, and the sun set afire a red-leafed tree outside the window where she poured me coffee. The angel talked about classrooms of little angels. And those moments in the middle of the day’s dawn moved us both in our midlives, removed from childhood angelicity, but in the dawn of later life’s glories.

I had to ride Cheryl home. Cold, she stalled when I didn’t let her warm up enough. Then we rolled, and it was bone-chilling cold, my visor fogged. This was the first 1m13s of the music piece here:

Then, I turned out of the neighborhood onto the main thoroghfare where the day’s Sun was spreading its wildfire among the leaves that hung on into early November. And the movement that starts at 1m14s into that piece welled up from inside. It’s a glorious, glorious day, and a gift of extraordinary weather lies ahead. Have you gone outside yet, to feel the flaming tongues of Nature’s cathedral licking at your heart yet? Go now…

(More on that same musical piece)

(More on Cheryl)

Neil D. 2020-11-07

Beware of therapy goals! (2) Envy and the Pitfalls of Validation

This article by another author presents envy as a sort of mirror of shame— a gap between what we have and what we want.

I think this is the grave peril of self-help as well as therapy to “work on things,” instead of doing inner work. Dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, etc. are part of our biological hardwiring. This makes us goal-driven creatures. And evolution has programmed us with negative emotions when we fail to achieve goals.

What the author presents as “expectations” is what I often have written about as ideals or idealizations. If your self-help materials or therapies have you “work on something,” beware. High expectations can lead to more pain than good. Some schools of therapy urge you to take little steps, so you can keep feeding your addictive hardwiring with incremental achievements. I think that has its place as the “gentleness” I mentioned in my prequel; but it can make us prey to therapy. What you should be working on is understanding your inner self (see my prequel Beware of therapy goals! (1) You’re prey.)

Knowing your fuller self enables you to recognize more realistic boundaries around your expectations.

Knowing your fuller self also more realistically tempers our desires to achieve ideals.

We are programmed to unconsciously and reflexively identify desirable ideals. We say we want to be “more like her,” or we want to be more of “this,” or less of “that.” Knowing your self reveals how much of “this” you are, and how much of “that” you don’t need, and that you are not “her.” That can yield what that author presents as humility. And that puts a foot on the ship of contentment, and a little less suffering.

Wish to be more You, and as you discover that you already are You, disappointment with unachieved goals lightens.

To know how good You already are demands that you study who you are, and that doesn’t mean affirming your good of which you’re already conscious; instead, plumb the depths of your dark Shadow, because it’s the You of which you’re unconscious.

Your Shadow is the perfect “textbook” custom-tailored to You as the subject! Over and over throughout the history of the best human thoughts recorded in writing, we are repeatedly urged to know our own evil and potential for evil in order to be more good—AND content.

That author presents this as “Expectation vs Reality”

“Betrayal — the worst of all pains — comes when that expectation is broken. The pain and sadness you feel is your body telling you ‘HEY, that false reality you’ve been living in, yeah not the best idea to keep living like that,’ and adjusts your view of the world to fit whatever data point you’ve just learnt.”

“Validation is like truth without facts. You feel like your belief is right because other people say so, but that doesn’t hold up to reality.”

“The reason why validation is so dangerous is that it actually puts you in the same spot as the liar. You’ve created a false reality around yourself that’s fundamentally rooted in experience, not fact.
So again, we become prone to betrayal and suffering.”

[Regarding why you should plumb the depths of your Shadow:] ”
Humility — low expectation.
Entitlement — high expectation.
Entitlement is really just the expression of expectation. Humility on the other hand is trying to minimize that expectation, and feeling satisfied with where you are.
Since we’re so goal oriented, it’s hard to feel super humble all the time, because it implies a satisfaction with your current state… Our biology doesn’t like that. We’re wired to self improve… Buddha believed our pain is caused by our goal-oriented nature, and constant striving to fulfill our desires.”

“…the expected outcome… When we don’t achieve it, we become sad — a sign that we aren’t well conditioned to the reality of the universe, and that our expectations based off previous experiences were actually wrong.”

The unfortunate hard truth is that you may be the only one to blame, explained by the same author here.

Each one of us constructs a perspective on reality according to our experiences. Two people can look at the same thing very differently—AND both be very “right.” Envy is a powerful emotional signal not so much that you are wrong, but that reality has alternative perceptions and you’re preferring a change in your perspective.

FeelWithNeil wishes for you to see the alternatives because many may be “true,” not just yours, and not just yours at a given moment. There’s an infinite space for you to grow into.

More to come in this series on therapy goal pitfalls. To be alerted when published, at the bottom of this page under Leave A Reply, enter your email (remains private), and checkmark “Notify me of new posts via email.”

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Neil D. 2020-11-03

Compassionate Reactions

When you see someone suffering, are you moved with sadness to compassion? Don’t you long to show them the love and kindness that every human being deserves? Even when the victim is a mean or miserable bastard, some of our heartstrings get plucked:

Seeing blameless victims moves us deeply. Most of us are also moved deeply when we see people suffering senselessly by their own hand. The better angels of our nature tell us that those who hurt themselves or others have some suffering in their own pasts.

So, how about you? For various reasons, we get conditioned into thinking that weakness is bad, so we don’t like to see ourselves as weak victims of suffering at the hands of another. What we like far less is any recognition that we have suffered at our OWN hands.

None of us can fully resist the power of shame. Aimed at it are all of our powerful psychological defenses and the insidious blame game. And that is why…

our own suffering fails to move us to the same depth of compassion for our own selves.

Yet, that is how God looks upon us. THIS is the “mind of Jesus.”

Most of us have some subconscious level of skepticism when we look at acts of altruism, but not when we look upon suffering. When most of us think of the story of Christ, we see the suffering of the crucifixion. It was a large act. We also bring to mind the many acts of compassion Jesus showed others, but we tend to do that collectively, as if it has to approach the size and scale of the crucifixion.

This sort of collectivization is a form of idealization. But it betrays the example of Jesus. We have ascribed too much grandiosity to the story of Jesus, so we lose sight of the person-to-person compassion he exemplified.

In our subconscious are some grand ideals that we subconsciously know are impossible to achieve as an individual. That distracts us from the tiny moment-to-moment opportunities we have to pour out love from inside of us.

We get consumed with thinking about the ultimate salvation of our soul and the perfection of our humanity, and we lose sight of how grandiose each small act of our loving truly is.

Large scale suffering easily elicits compassion. So, think of yourself as suffering on a large scale. For you, as an individual person, are as precious to God as the whole world is.

Let God save the world. Let God love the whole world. Let yourself love you and each face you touch moment by moment. Selflessness does not mean no self consideration. Touch your own self with the limitless compassion and love you think you aim only at others and the whole world:

God loves us not collectively, but each tender and suffering soul at a time. That’s what the Christ shows us.

Neil D. 2020-10-23

We need YOUR loving

Does someone need your loving today?

EVERYONE you encounter today needs your loving.

Your brand of loving, from deep inside of your humble heart, is a unique stitch in the fabric of creation. Pour it out from inside you, without fanfare, when no one is looking.

We need you.

Our world is less, without your loving.

“EVERYONE you encounter today needs your loving.” Even if YOU are the only one you encounter.

Neil D. 2020-10-22