How to increase understanding
To gain new understanding you have to extend your limits.
To extend your limits you have to provoke your limits by engaging influences that are just above your current level of understanding and/or just outside your current circle of interests.
This can involve mental, emotional, or physical activity. Classic books, higher music, athletics or performing arts.
This all requires effort and initiative. An active approach. Self-motivated.
If you want to understand yourself and the world around you better, don't merely work within your current limits, extend your limits with new influences. It's like giving your computer a better operating system, or new, interesting programs and applications. You're not a computer, but you know what I mean.
8 Comments:
I just recently recognized this and started attending a high voltage gym where you are expected to work the body hard, outside of it's comfort zone after going 12 months with very little exercise. It has been painful but that pain comes with a type of pleasure.
The other thing is I live with a person who is completely involved with the world (like most people on this planet) and it's been quite depressing to realize that there is nothing I can do directly to help them to see what this is all based on and that there are other possibilities. This desire for them to see what i see is in part selfish, but it also has a deeper component, it's painful to see them living the way they do, under more laws, setting up future problems for themselves.
I was thinking about how to approach this and the idea of conscious labor and intentional suffering came up, that I need to externally show them true kindness and affection, no matter what I might feel about them. I think this is the only way to get through and provide myself with a useful task at the same time..
The person you mention can also come out of their current state by slight degree, i.e. engagement with higher influences (for them) to just even a slight degree. Getting stuck at a beginner level is the problem beyond that. Books I read when just starting out which were a 'revelation' to me could be easily mocked. (Classic short stories I think are an easily forgotten though powerful genre in a person's awakening/development; and their length makes them easier to engage...)
Turning toward God completely and thoroughly is a revelation. That phase where I'm one leg in the world and one leg in the Work is hell. For sometime I've been seeing this person (the fake ruler) behind the scenes usurp and corrupt any good that would come my way in terms of possibilities.
Becoming aware of this at a deep level in itself was big because it was made clear to me what was needed.
To make this description a little more solid I'll give you an example. There is certain behavior that I have allowed to go on for years that I know is not good-householder level behavior but I've always constructed and told myself little stories that would allow this behavior to continue unchecked. This is where my work was, I needed to confront that fake ruler, the little person behind the scenes making all those terrible decisions that were antithetical to any further movement upwards. This is connected with self-will, aim, real-will and a God-centered life. It needs higher energy to confront properly, long periods of self-remembering, higher impressions and work centered around second conscious shock.
I've just about finished a little book titled 'Transformations' by Bennett which I found to be a good resource.
What you describe, I would say, for me would be the difficult subject of how much should I be preoccupied or even care about all the descending lunacy and evil that is coming at us 360 degrees, 24/7.
It's a difficult subject for me because it seems as if I'm giving up, or giving in to it if I disengage my attention from it. I know it has a vampire quality.
We're told to confront the devil, to stand. Maybe a biblical analogy I'm thinking of at the moment will help: when Israel got away from God their world would get invaded by Assyrians (or similar types). We can imagine how that would turn their world upside-down, not just the presence of enemy foreigners, but the lunatic Satanic culture and the dupes on your own side sympathetic to it. The Satanic inversions everywhere. What were the Israelites supposed to do? Get back with God. Turning toward God completely and thoroughly, in your words.
There is a great awakening element in what is going on today, so it's not all just being in the power of the vampire..., but there is also a mistake in allowing it to swamp me (another meaning to 'draining the swamp' I suppose).
“What you describe, I would say, for me...”
Another way to put it is that we have to confront the resistance (whatever that may be). We want friction and we need to continue to confront those things that represent resistance (usually buffers, sometimes big and right in front of our nose). We have to keep it real and practical, while working for ourselves, our neighbour and God.
A few points I missed in that ‘Turning toward God..’ post. Prayer and praise to God, and asking for help and forgiveness of our sins, working through our sins is an opportunity to acknowledge and confront the resistance.
Do you mean like, how Gurdjieff talked about, using the Russian revolution to awaken? The friction? How such historical happenings are rare energy to be used in the Work sense? Two conscious shocks...
Yes, anything that represents real resistance real friction. That’s obviously going to be different for you than it is for me.
Good readding
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