I could keep going, but it’s your turn. You have a feeling for it now. The source that these come from is truly endless.
Compare these examples to walking in with flowers or chocolates. At the same time, realize that avoiding linearity is not a rule. Flowers or chocolates now and then add spice to nonlinearity.
Reconnecting to your imagination will take intentional efforts. It does not happen all by itself or just by thinking about it. Participating in improvisational theater workshops could get you started. Not improvisational dance, but improvisational theater where you feel and express emotions not by acting but rather by re-experiencing them and sharing the experience out loud. Look for a workshop leader who uses warm-up exercises from Keith Johnstone and his book Impro – exercises which require you to go up on stage with a partner and use face, voice and posture to start something out of nothing and for no reason; exercises that require you to tell nonlinear imagination stories that you never heard before, one after the other in rapid succession, being interrupted at short random intervals and required to change stories mid-sentence. These are steps along the path of rediscovering the whereabouts of your nonlinear imagination. Once you find your imagination and see that it still functions after all these years, you can plug your heart back into its richly abundant resources.
Mind Your Own Business
After all this talk of saying yes or no, asking for what you want, making boundaries, and so on, it is still necessary to directly examine a particularly pernicious mechanicality of the Box that undermines even noble efforts to establish extraordinary human relationship. The mechanicality comes from the Box’s basic assertion that its own solutions to the problems of life are the best solutions to the problems of life. Since your Box assumes it has the best answers, whenever there is a conflict between your Box and anyone else’s Box the obvious solution is for the other person to change so they are using your better solutions. Our Box is absolutely committed to the viewpoint that the other person is wrong and stupid if they do not change in the ways we see they could so easily change.
Despite all your efforts have you ever succeeded in changing anyone? Has anyone ever succeeded in changing you? No. Change of behavior is not so simple. For example, change of behavior does not result from changing your behavior. Change of behavior results from changing the design of the Box – which does not change except through building new matrix to hold expanded consciousness. This expanded consciousness reshapes the Box by taking it through the liquid state into a new form. Yet, astonishing as it is, we still listen to our Box insist that the solution to our problems would be so easy if only the other person would change. The fact that they do not change is the source of our irritation. The view that our problems are the other person’s fault grips our thinking like Velcro gloves grip the back of a sheep.
Our partnership problems do not come from our partner not changing. Our problems with our partner come from our own rigidity about how things should be. It takes ruthless self-honesty to admit that our real challenge is the rigidity of our Box’s expectations. Our Box’s self-defending structure provides us with rigid criteria to measure our circumstances against. If a circumstance does not meet our Box’s expectation then it tells us that the circumstance (our partner) is wrong. If the circumstance does not change, this proves that the circumstance (our partner) is committed to being our enemy. Obviously, if our partner loved us they would not attack us by doing things that are so infuriating.
MAP OF CHANGED RESULTS
CHANGED RESULTS DO NOT COME FROM TRYING TO CHANGE YOUR BEHAVIOR. CHANGED RESULTS COME FROM CHANGING THE THOUGHT-MAPS OF YOUR BOX.
Ordinary thinking assumes that we can get new results without changing our behavior, or that we can change our behaviors without changing the thought-maps of our Box that produced these particular behaviors. Our real challenge is the rigidity of our Box's assumptions!
Wishing for someone else to change is the equivalent of wanting someone else to vote Republican or to become Buddhist. It is not up to you what they choose to do. If you vote Republican or become Buddhist is that anyone else’s business? What someone else does is out of your hands. If you think the problem with your horrible neighbor will be resolved by them moving out, just wait until they move out and the next horrible neighbor moves in. In most cases the conflicts you have are not externally sourced by the circumstances; your conflicts are internally sourced by your own Box.
For example, have you ever been kept awake by someone else’s party noise? Midnight construction workers? Someone snoring? The linear solutions presented by the Box for solving these problems seem so obvious: Go tell the neighbors to turn down the music. (After all, don’t they know what time it is?) Complain to the city about the construction noise. Shove a sock into the snorer’s mouth. These are linear solutions. What about nonlinear solutions? What if instead of trying to force external conditions to change so that they match the rigid requirements specified by your Box, you instead took your Box into the liquid state where it could no longer hold rigid requirements? What if you applied the nonlinear possibilities of extraordinary human love? What if you decided that the local party animals are your best friends and you truly enjoy hearing them have such a great time together? What if you loved the workers for sacrificing their night to repair things so you could live in a better city? What if you loved that person snoring next to you so much that their snores wrapped you in a warm blanket and rocked you to sleep?
The Box leads us to think that we can be happy by changing what we have. The Box says that what we have determines what we can do. Then what we do determines whether or not we can be happy, or satisfied, or pleased, or fulfilled. The way the Box sees things, if we had a great job then we could do what we really love to do and then we could finally be happy. The problem, in the Box’s view, is that we do not have the right job (the right partner, the right dress). So then we spend all our efforts trying to get a new job, have more money in the bank, own the Z4 convertible, and dust the souvenirs from our Egyptian vacation, but has anything changed for us? No. We still make the same decisions to make the same actions as we did before, because the place where our decisions and our actions come from has not changed. As Buckaroo Banzai said in the film of the same name, “Wherever you go, there you are.” The place where our decisions and our actions come from is our being. They come from who we are.
Thinking about who you are before you think about what to do or what you have is not the Box’s strategy. The Box’s original commitment is to keep you the same, not to change who you are. The Box has ulterior motives behind its strategy. Keeping you the same is how the Box thinks it can guarantee your survival. The Box’s motivation to assure survival is exactly what it is supposed to do for you until age fifteen. But after that, limiting you to merely surviving is a pitiable outcome compared to what is possible if you are really living. In fact, the formula may not work at all like the Box markets it. Things may actually be exactly the opposite.
If being happy, for example, depended on what you did and you found that raking leaves made you happy, then it would be a certain and repeatable way to stay happy if you raked leaves all day every day. But, of course, this is nonsense. You already know by experience that even if raking leaves all day made you happy one day, there is no guarantee how you might feel raking leaves the next day, or even the next minute.
Being happy is a Bright Principle. So is being satisfied, fulfilled, challenged, engaged, excited, loving, generous, accepting, kind, grateful, communicative, spontaneous and appreciative. Bright Principles are forces of nature that move you to do what is necessary to do in each moment during your day. The Bright Principles you represent determine the qualities of who you are being. Out of the doing that flows from the Bright Principles that you are being come the results of what you have. What you have turns out to be totally satisfying, no matter what it is, because what you have comes directly from who you are. And who you are is your own business.
Be Responsible
for Who You Talk To in Your Partner
Changing what you have or what you do starts with changing who you are. How do you change who you are? Like ordering lunch at a restaurant, how do you “order up” which Principles to serve? If you do not place your order consciously in each moment for particular Bright Principles to serve, then what you get is the “special of the day,” usually some slop from the underworld that your Gremlin ordered while you were napping.
Ordering from the menu also applies to ordering what you want from your partner. Imagine that you are going to a fine restaurant, sitting at the perfect table, looking carefully through the elegant menu and ordering exactly those things that you hate to eat. Doesn’t this sound crazy? You would be torturing yourself. But this is exactly what we do in ordinary human relationship. We look at our partner and what we focus on is what we do not like about them. By focusing our attention on what we don’t like, we feed those qualities with our energy and cause them to show up more intensely. We arrange to order from our partner what we hate about them, and then we blame our partner for what we just ordered.
Here is an experiment to try. If there are some behaviors of your partner that particularly irritate your Box, stop placing an order for those behaviors. A human being is not a single, solid, and unchanging personality. A human being is a whole neighborhood of personalities. Your partner is a human being. So, just like every other human being, your partner experiences and expresses a vast array of characteristic qualities during their day. Why are you consistently dialing up Grumpy or Ditzy when who you really want to be-with is Captain Jack Sparrow? Cross the old characters out of your phone book. Dial up the characters you want to enjoy.
If you accidentally dial the wrong number, apologize. Hang up and try again. Say, “Not that one. I am not speaking to that one. I want to speak with the other guy.” When your partner says, “He’s busy. He’s out to lunch. He is not available right now,” then you say, “I’d like to make an appointment for when he returns. I am only interested in speaking with him directly. I’ll call back later.” And then do exactly that.
The Box is what the Box is. The characters of the Box are the characters of the Box. There are characters in your partner’s-neighborhood Box whom you truly love, admire and appreciate. Call them up and enjoy the hell out of them. The rest? Let them do their thing. None of those characters are any of your business or any of your responsibility. Spend your time visiting with your favorites. Why not?
Every human being is involved in their own unique process of development, dealing with their own particular issues in their own unique time. Our evolutionary process is no one else’s business. It is private. This means that it is not your job to educate your partner, to heal your partner, or to change your partner. If their mother could not change them, why do you think that you can? It is your job to respect your partner, enjoy your partner, and accept them exactly how they are. And. It is your job to take care of your own evolutionary needs. If that means reading books, attending talks, being in trainings, meeting with your men’s or women’s circle, doing meditation or martial arts practices, whatever you need, take care of getting it for yourself. Do not wait around thinking that your partner can provide you with all the energetic vitamins and minerals necessary to maintain your four bodies in good health. The fallacy of thinking that both partners in a relationship will evolve at the same rate and have the same requirements at the same time will only lead to frustration and deep resentments. Extraordinary human relationship is not about holding yourself back for the comfort of your partner. The relationship itself is part of what moves you forward. It is up to you to make use of it that way.
Do the Italian Thing
In many cultures of the world arguing with your mate immediately, up front, and out loud is offensive and unacceptable. Particularly in modern Western cultures where we have been civilized. The storm rider in us has been anaesthetized. What we forget is that our concept of “being civilized” is totally relative, depending completely on which civilization raises us. Travel to Greece sometime, or Italy. Hang around small shops and back street neighborhoods. Soak in the way people talk to each other. Before long you will notice how “hot” the conversations are. People do not talk to each other, they shout at each other. They argue, rant, and rail each other about every incident or question. Their interactions are consistently and repeatedly intense. And this behavior is completely normal in that culture. In fact, they do not even notice what they are doing, until such time as they travel to another country where the conversation habits are different. An Italian in Germany cannot understand why the German people are so cold and aloof with each other. It feels distant and makes no sense.
Arguing hotly with your mate is not necessarily bad or wrong. It is not necessarily immature or irresponsible. It could be an experiment, interacting in a different style, portraying a different character. It could be giving yourself more permission to be publicly passionate about what you are already privately passionate about. The point here is to not always stick to monotone and logic in your interactions. Try doing the “Italian thing.” Exploding with passion now and then gets the juices flowing in ways and in places where maybe the juices have been stagnating for far too long. Rant, rave, and whip up a little chaos now and then. Stir the soup. Shake the scorpions. To paraphrase Emile Zola, “Life is meant to be lived out loud.”
Breaking out of the somnambulant, smiling “nice girl” or “nice guy” mask – plastered on us by well-meaning parents, relatives and schoolteachers in modern civilization – can be nearly impossible. Extracting ourselves from this glutinous sweetness will not happen by itself. You either make efforts to break the mold or you continue to get make efforts to break the mold or you continue to get moldy.
Experimenting with the Italian thing may feel like you are going a little bit crazy. Great! We get so worried sometimes about losing control, going out of our mind, stepping over the limit, being impolite, “hurting other people’s feelings,” coming unglued, losing our marbles, and so on. We are so habitually flaccid that our vitality dribbles away like an old man’s piss. Spunk can instantaneously reignite itself as soon as you unlock your own handcuffs, waken the storm rider, or pull the rubber pacifier out of your mouth that they shoved in there so long ago to keep you quiet. Pirates do not wear pacifiers. Go knock on some doors after midnight. Wake yourself up. The Italian thing: it comes and it goes. Afterward you can share cappuccinos and cantuccine, and laugh together.
Do Not Date to Find a Mate
Looking for a partner while using what we typically understand to be “dating” includes so many problem offspring that you will spend most of your energy running in circles trying to undo the difficulties they create. The conventional idea of dating is to present yourself attractively so as to make a fine catch of a partner. The joke becomes apparent when you realize that you are falsely representing yourself so as to find a “perfect match” who turns out to also be falsely representing them selves! No wonder you get disappointed. It’s an old joke – but with the popularity of silicon implants, liposuction, hair waxing and Botox injections – the joke is eminently worth retelling: One man on his wedding night waited for his new bride to get undressed for bed. She went into the bathroom and took off her wig, her girdle, her padded bra, her false eyelashes, her makeup, and her colored contact lenses. When she re-entered the bedroom her husband screamed in fright because he did not recognize her at all. He thought he was in the wrong hotel room!
Dating is a way to try to outsmart Mother Nature. We think we can make a better choice about our partner than She can. We have all heard stories of computer dating agencies producing life long relationships. We have also heard stories of people winning the lottery. The point is that if you focus all your efforts on finding a mate, once you have one, then what? Then you can finally start living?
I strongly suggest that you live first. Go get on your way. Find out where you are going before you try to find someone to go with you. First fin
ding out who you and where you are going allows the laws of precession can come into play. “Precession” is a term from physics, meaning that when certain objects are in motion then sideways forces come from “out of nowhere” and influence how the object moves. This is how boomerangs turn around and come back when you throw them. The thing to remember about boomerangs is that they do not come back if you do not throw them first. An object has to be moving before the laws of precession take effect.
For example, if you decide that you want to find a partner, a mate, and you go to a party for that purpose, you probably won’t have much luck. But if you get seriously into your life and take actions toward creating what really matters to you, then when you need some lettuce you, of course, go to the grocery store to buy lettuce. The man next to you says, “Sniff the stem.” You say, “Huh?” He says, “Try sniffing the cut stem. If it smells bitter try another one. If it smells sweet it’s a tasty head of lettuce.” You get to talking. It turns out he hires you to help with a project that is exactly in your field of expertise. While doing your work you represent the project at a trade fair and there working across from you in a competing booth is a woman. She becomes your partner. This is how the laws of precession work. When you are in authentic motion, serving your destiny, then sideways forces can create “coincidences” that support your evolution. If you are not propelled into motion, being moved by the force of your destiny, then Mother Nature does not have the elbowroom to work with you. False motion is not good enough. Being busy with dating so as to find the perfect “10” to fulfill your fantasy image is false motion.
Radiant Joy Brilliant Love Page 33
