After I had attenuated my spiritual endeavors, and between marriages I began to think that there was some relationship between our thoughts, feelings, and desires with the events and material status of our lives. I had noticed a similarity between daydreams and patterns of thought with what showed up in my life.
I couldn’t put words or particulars to my general sense and then came across one of the many Seth books that had begun to populate the shelves at the local university bookstore.
Some of the ideas in the book were the polar opposite of what sensible people think; but having had some psychic experiences and dreams I was developing a disdain for regular sensibilities, I continued to read.
And so began my long journey and adventure into the life of those who at least endeavor to “create their own reality”.
Although I would be the last to admit it, we live in a world of relationships: friends, family, work, government and others who in some way impinge on our lives. We have work relationships, love and sex relationships, casual get together and drink relationships; come over and let’s celebrate Christmas relationships. These all provide us something and expect something from us. Our friends want us to show up at the appointed tavern and get drunk with them, our bosses want us to be fully functional at work. Our wives want other things, and I’m not sure I want to speculate too much about that.
When we want to change in some significant way, our relationships tug at us; complain to us; potentially pat us on the back or kick us in an inappropriate to mention spot. So we are forced to make decisions; although fate can intervene – in my case a couple of my friends left town. Sometimes people around us don’t want us to succeed; these can be friends or relatives. You fit as you are into their little universe, and when you suddenly say, have more money, you don’t fit the same way.
Learn to say goodbye. Sometimes you have to leave town.
One of the points of the book that I took home is that if you want one thing in particular, you may be able to achieve it. If you want two things that can’t both happen, then you have a problem. This described me perfectly, full of contradictory ideas about how things are; or how things should be.
It helps in the first place to have an idea of what you want: the clearer and more concise the idea the better. For some unfathomable reason that I will probably never know (lots of friends and relatives with diametrically opposed ideas?) I had decided that I shouldn’t know what I want.
Or if I did I shouldn’t tell anyone for the embarrassment that it would cause. Never say you want a great paying job to a socialist relative that you don’t want to disappoint. And if you loan them enough money, they may never feel right about you again.
I could also speculate that I suffered from having given myself over to ideas of enlightenment that were essentially non-rational; this is perhaps the failure of the Western perspective of Eastern ideas. But it had the unfortunate effect of failing me personally along with it.
It is wonderful to be full of Bhakti, or in Western terms the love of God, but it can be bad when you have to work for somebody else and you have to at least appear rational about things.
The university was full of people who were less rational about things than me; the working world was not. What a rude awakening that was!
Maybe I had drunk too much vodka and smoked too much weed and had washed up on the continent of stupidity.
I had quite some distance to crawl back from but at least I had been given a map.
u3C
