Lazarus, Come Forth

If we enter an awareness of oneness in any situation we’re facing, if we stop begging, waiting, hoping, exporting the saving power, and all this, we find that the pain of separation (from whatever we want) and the longing for fulfillment are one and the same as the Intelligence that can manifest that fulfillment.

Let me say this again, as it bears repeating:

Desire itself is proof of the presence and engagement of that Intelligence that can fulfill the desire, as long as we’re not believing in separateness.

Time is a persistent consideration in Particle life, as we all seem to like to remember, but maybe this is an indication of the extent to which our resolve is weak.

When Jesus calls Lazarus from the tomb, he doesn’t say, “Lazarus, come forth in twenty or thirty minutes.” He doesn’t say, “Lazarus, come forth soon.” He says, “Lazarus, come forth.”

This is remarkable and instructional. In thus directing the “dead” Lazarus, Jesus reveals something about spiritual authority in general: His words assume Lazarus to be alive. 

He doesn’t say “Lazarus, come back to life.” This is so important. 

He expects Lazarus to act as a living man would and could.

Time considerations don’t enter into it. How could there be time in Oneness?

This consciousness of Oneness, as the starting and ending point, is so different from using consciousness to try to crate a job or more money or the right partner or anything else. 

It’s meditative rather than premeditative, a resting in the miracle of longing that puts us on good terms with the universe. 

..

What would it mean to really get the truth that every longing can be trusted, because in a reality of Oneness, the longing is its own fulfillment?

What would shift on the side of consciousness in that place where consciousness and events commingle? 

Might not one’s slightest wish come true, better than one expected, since each wish would be recognized as the Field being oneself? 

Don’t try to grasp this logically or intellectually; it has to be lived. 

The awareness of Oneness is fulfillment. “Lazarus, come forth.” You see, it’s done.

Three words that contain the whole teaching.

Is time itself (the time it takes for outer manifestation) anything more than a manifestation of our doubt, of our readiness to go running back to the belief in separateness?

You may be sitting there, in the laboratory maze of your life, running into walls, hopping over various electric grids, pushing little levers in the hope of getting a food pellet, pushing them with great urgency because you’re hungry, heart aching, waiting—again or still.

And in this, it would be easy to miss something astounding—that within the hunger and the aching and the waiting hide assumptions dyed through and through in the color of separateness, assumptions that, seen from a spiritual point of view, are in one sense utterly self- defeating. 

But if you forget the maze and the pellet, and look that in the eye, everything changes, and you’re set free, and nourished at every turn.

How to make the leap across the dream-chasm of separateness to the reality of a Oneness within which every longing is fulfilled for the simple reason that the longing itself is recognized as evidence of fulfillment? 

How to catch time in the act of hypnotizing us into believing that our heart’s desire is one thing and its fulfillment another? 

As long as we believe in this dream, we are fated to go from loss to loss, to wait for the right job, to pray to a fantasy god rather than open our eyes to the stunning truth that in the miracle of our longing, our prayers already have been answered. 

When we catch on to this, every prayer becomes a decree—a “Lazarus, come forth,”— and we see as with new eyes that everything we have always wanted or could ever want has been given to us in who we are.

............

On Creating “Events” 

What we call “the event” is actually a gateway to numerous alternate versions of that event. In all cases, the event mirrors and is caused and sustained by our stance toward it. This is reverse causality, from the Particle point of view.

Therefore:

The event seems unmovable only because our stance has become unmovable.

The event seems impervious to change because our willfulness is locked on “the event”; the intractability we feel and ascribe to the event as something inherent actually is nothing but our own rigidity, resistance, judgment, and so on.

The event will not, cannot change as long as we continue reacting to it in the old way, because “the event” is already formed out of the stance that then shows up, seemingly, as the reaction to the event.

We allowed ourselves to be drawn through the gateway into a certain form of the event that seemed convincing. This is called “being taken in by appearances.”

Therefore:

Especially in a crisis, it’s imperative to hold to a fluid, accepting, unresisting stance long enough to pass through the gateway of “the event” into an alternate version (reality).

As we practice this, the event shapeshifts seamlessly into the alternate version (reality). No version of any event can persist without a corresponding consciousness requiring it.

Therefore:

The event in itself may be regarded as an opportunity, nothing more, for consciousness to come home to itself as the creative source.

The event is a gateway, and need not be given importance at the level of its form, which is highly fluid, as long as the corresponding stance doesn’t lock onto it and fix it in place.

A shift in identity carries us through the gate of the event at a different angle, as it were, altering the event into a new, perhaps opposite form.

.....

To illustrate:

Breaking up with a partner can be regarded as evidence of separateness, conflict, loss—or as a catalyst, a trigger for inner confrontation and transcending to greater self- solidarity that sets the event on a reality path leading to meaningful contact and reconciliation, or something even better.

There is nothing inherent in the breaking up that requires the outcome to be defined by loss.

So, it’s not just that the event itself has variants, but also that each version of the event comes complete with unique past and future unfoldings.

The determining factor is always the consciousness manifesting the event as such, which means entering the gate of the event as it does and so being mirrored by the event.

There is no work whatsoever to be done on “the event.” All work must be done on the side of consciousness as it enters the gate.

Nothing is impossible.

All realities can manifest.

All things are real.

We change our consciousness in relation to a given event, and the event must change.

Hardness of will is mirrored as hardness, softness of will as softness. Love is an irresistible force.

Acceptance and nonresistance manifest as the best possible outcome for all, without fail.

~•*

source: field project dot net

quote

"To appreciate the good that has expressed itself up till now without holding back, while still being willing to take the next step, even if it’s a little scary, without needing to make the past a fall-guy—this is skillful practice."

~•*

source: field project dot net

A Dancing World Without End

Good and Better

To become skilled at “Field-think” and “Field-speak,” we need to let go of certain habitual ways of looking at things. One of these involves our insistence that there is any such thing as the “negative.” I can tell you, this is often not a bias that goes easily. 

Even advanced students of Field training often slip into the language of the morality play, deeming some of our experiences, typically associated with what we want, as good or positive, and others, typically associated with what we’ve had, as bad or negative. 

In this judgment, of course, we miss an important point that’s not only central to Field theory, but also essential to practice: that what we have had up till now has served us, that it served some understandable and legitimate purpose, that it had its reason. 

It is no more bad than crawling is bad for a six-month- old. Crawling is good. It’s a victory over not crawling. In the same way, walking will be a victory over crawling, and in this way, the expressions of spirit move from good to better, with no interference until we get older and inherit the belief that there is anything in life that is bad.

The judgment of any experience as bad prevents our recognizing the good there, the way it has served. It inhibits our ability to appreciate it. 

This turns out to be a decisive inhibition, because as long as we believe a thing is bad, we will not accept it. To the contrary, we will seek to rid ourselves of it, deny it, run away from it, kill it. 

In other words, we will be in a state of resistance toward it, and this very resistance binds us to it so that we can’t let it go and move on to something that would serve us better. 

Condemn something, and what you condemn is yours. 

On the other hand, it really isn’t necessary to dislike the house, town, job, or partnership you’re in to recognize that it is no longer true for you, and that something else would suit you better. 

You can even love what you’ve outgrown for what it gave you, its season, its contribution to your story. 

And this love oils the machinery of living, and allows moving on to be gracious. Indeed, without it, there is no moving on.

Voltaire said, among many other wonderful things, “Better is the enemy of good.” And while this wouldn’t make it as a maxim for Field training because of that little word enemy that slipped in there, it certainly captures something of what I’m talking about here, and with the right emphasis, captures the whole of it: “Our desire for something better may lead us to regard the good we have known as an enemy.” 

Not as eloquent as Voltaire, certainly, but the expansion of the idea may be clarifying.

What you have blamed, hated, resisted, condemned, avoided, denied, struggled against, made into an enemy was something good, something that had no grievance against you, something that gave you the only gift it had to give you when you were not open to receiving more. You can recognize it, appreciate it, love it, thank it, and from there, move on. 

Now, this is not the whole story. In Field training, where paradox reigns, no truth is the whole truth. 

If we believe that “Good is the enemy of better,” we may overvalue the good we have known to avoid moving on, to defer taking the next step into a better version of self and the better life that goes with it. 

Field training doesn’t teach us that there’s no such thing as the negative in order to encourage us to defer our greater good. It isn’t the nature of Particle consciousness to stand still. 

The very center of us wants to move forward to ever greater identitiy, fulfillment, creativity, expression, health, wealth, purpose, love, and life. Using “Good is the enemy of better” to postpone the next step is not skillful practice. Every baby knows this. 

Clearly, there is a balance here: To appreciate the good that has expressed itself up till now without holding back, while still being willing to take the next step, even if it’s a little scary, without needing to make the past a fall-guy—this is skillful practice. 

By its light, change becomes a flow of graceful and natural transitions in which every crawling becomes a walking that becomes a running that becomes a dancing world without end.

~•*

source: field project dot net

Is Time an Illusion?

Is Time An Illusion? (short video)

{The Trews, episode 75

..featuring Russell Brand}

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kSMwy0_42gE&sns=tw

..courtesy of @kriistol1 on Twitter

Way Sooner than Soon

What are some of the assumptions of traditional psychotherapy that Field training does not make?

Well, psychotherapy assumes that there is something wrong with the client, that the therapist is an expert whose training and experience endow him or her with the ability to solve the problem, and that this process will take time—generally many weeks or months, if not years.

It’s important to note here that these assumptions, which Field training calls intentions (beliefs about what’s real) do work.

They work precisely to the extent that both the client and therapist believe they do.

Field training, on the other hand, makes assumptions of a different sort—that there is nothing wrong, since the problem really is a solution, and everything is always working perfectly through the law of correspondence; that each person is his or her own expert; and that the process of shifting from contradiction to alignment takes no time at all.

This doesn’t mean that it takes just a little time. It means no time. 

The paradoxes built in to Field training render any shift into a more fulfilling identity something that’s always “already done” and available. So, while it may take a little time (usually minutes) to become aware of and choose to appropriate this more fulfilling identity, we are aware of and choosing something that, in terms of time, preceded our awareness and choosing.

Along these lines, I’ve often sat with and soon was laughing with students who were choosing to postpone some desired shift on the grounds that it was “coming soon.”

In Field practice, soon is never.

The fulfilled state is not even as far off in the future as to be “soon.”

As Christianity tells us, “The Kingdom of Heaven [fulfillment] is at hand,” and in Field training terms, the only way to have what you want is to already have it by being the self that corresponds to it.

This is a very different assumption than the one that presumes a process taking weeks, months, or years.

It, too, is self-fulfilling.

Which path one chooses may well come down to a question of whether one wishes to experience the desired version of self and corresponding reality now or “soon.”

For some, the slower route is the preferred one.

Now, there are some forms of psychotherapy—non-traditional ones—whose methods more closely approximate the methods, if they can be called that, of Field training.

The work of Milton Erikson is a great example. Erikson used subtle induction techniques to blow the client’s mind. Transformation in such cases takes no more time than it takes to believe something new.

This explains at least somewhat why deliberate creating is much more a feeling than a thinking art.

Thinking the new reality without feeling it will not work; feeling it without thinking it will.

In order to become consciously the creators we already are, we have to learn to move from the heart, and forego the lesser benefits of analyzing, figuring out, and otherwise remaining in the attic of the mind.

Like the student of Zen, we answer the answerless koan, something the mind cannot do, since the answer must be a willingness to be more than we have been, and not merely a logical or rational formulation.

The moment we’re willing to examine all of our assumptions, including our professional ones, ask ourselves whether or not we wish to continue believing in them, and answer from the heart of what’s most true and beautiful for us, we are already in that wonderful, quiet place that D.T. Suzuki called “beginner’s mind,” a place the Field finds irresistible.

~•*

source: field project dot net

Am I Willing to Have It?

Reality demands our very being, and will not settle for less, no matter what the stakes.

We don’t overcome the world of our lack because it hardly occurs to us to first overcome the self that corresponds to that world.

It calls for a sacrifice—the lesser for the greater, and “no man can serve two masters.”

All of this leads to one of the most sobering self-questions we can ask:

Not, “Do I want this?”

 ..but “Am I willing to have it.?”

~•*

source: field project dot net

Solution: Ignore the Problem

Creative denial simply means refusing to feed a problem with attention, knowing that attention is creative.

How exhilarating to know we have the power to choose what has presence in our life and what does not, for in light of this choice, our life is created with unfailing precision.

~•*

source: field project dot net