Gentle Lessons


We are fond of looking for the lessons in experience in order to assuage the pangs of resisting it.

This is quite sensible, because it places us at a created viewpoint from which we can assume at least some degree of causation. (Especially when we view these lessons as taught to ourselves by ourselves, rather than by the world). Then we can begin to notice the postulated variations on knowledge that have brought us through the trials we feel we have been through.

A smart and glib summation of this whirlwind might be, 'In the final analysis, all there is to know is that knowingness varies.'

But if you remove yourself from the abstract wisdom of conceptual thought (which we all have been over-inundated with) and re-enter the zone of genuine contact, personal involvement with the hot core of active knowing, un-edited by crafty scales and clever formulae, you have a different story to tell.

Then, the substance o knowing tells. It then makes a real difference what postulates you design and energize because it is live, straight-from-the-well energy that is involved.

This has been called feeling what is there to be felt.

In the dust devil of genuine experience, where knowing is the kilovolt generator of every turn and spark rather than a dry sketch of other people's concerns, how do you learn lessons? What really produces an acquired wisdom deeper than the analytical abstractions of logic, semantics, theories of Id and Ego, abstract principles about minds and beings?

Lessons happen; they are, to the consciousness that actually acquires them, events and milestones. Because they are milestones, they must have a possible existence in the template of possible realities which the user imposes on existence.

These templates are not built out of significance or a semantic architecture. They have their own architectonics, of real McCoy sensible, palatable, tangible structure in consciousness, which is sometimes glibly referred to as a belief system. There are no semantic labels for the actual belief template with which consciousness impinges on existence. But they are surely felt and more surely known.

Lessons that can be experienced in consciousness occur as events, not thoughts in the abstract sense, at the place where consciousness itself, with the throttle wide open, is pouring on the steam to continue the generation of consideration, perception, event, resistance, desire and motion. These are the furnace-flames which fire the boilers of individual identity and motion on any dynamic vector in this or any other universe where consciousness travels.

Given the nature of templates and milestones, a lesson has to happen to have any weight. In order to happen it has to enter within the allowed possibilities of existence defined by the individual's template. This of course could mean anything from a cold supper to a cataclysmic collapse of a city most people would consider either within the realm of possibility.

But a lesson also requires value to be a milestone. It must be of sufficient impact or magnitude to be considered a milestone rather than a dull section of the background. A milestone is simply a change of sufficient importance to be considered a separate event by consciousness.

Finally, a lesson must be gentle. This simply means that it arrives through the portals of possibility at a rate capable of being felt. Lessons which arrive with too much luggage or at too fast a clip will not be felt. They will be (a) denied (b) frozen in time (c) turned into external information rather than assimilated (d) resisted in some other way. All these add up to resistance of experience in one guise or another.

Lessons which actually happen as lessons happen in the presence of the complete will to experience. This is the condition that exists when the cognition happens, after the lengthy process of viewing. It is the condition that exists when 'AHA!' experiences occur in the analysts office, or in the cab of a semi rolling through Chicago at sunrise, or at a poolside in Maui.

The condition of complete will-to-experience is itself brought about by a sufficiency of affinity to alloy automatic resistance; a sufficiency of familiarity to allow recognition while still 'pushing the envelope' of reality; and a sufficiency of communication to allow some reflection through other identities as the being assimilates the responsibility inherent in the lesson.

These factors add up to a gentle lesson even if the experience is a thrilling close call, a brush with bankruptcy, a fear or an elation close to the limits of the possible, that leaves one panting with after-images.

What these factors mean for you is as variable as the templates that make individuals. Wanting to acquire lessons better, you could go about it by widening the portals of existence with the belief 'I commit myself to complete willingness to experience anything.'

This might open some doors that you had previously held shut, and unwanted feelings, but if the conviction of complete willingness to feel is not allowed to pale these too will pass. And the acquisition of lessons extends and accelerates because the individual considers ALL POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE as a gentle lesson. When he can do that, he has the world by the shorts.

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