Author: John

Orienting the Work in Time

Time has no moments

The journey isn’t moving forward in time – dynamic forces at work can be interpreted by the mind as movement – explore these forces

Prior to me asking this question, where are you?

There are millions of words written and spoken about being in the NOW. People aspire to be in the moment. The moment is magical according to some.

Think about it: a point in time is related to as a place because the self is inserting itself into that time, making it a place on the time map.

When we’re projecting the past into the present or future, we’re doing so in the moment. So, where’s the magic? It’s confusing because you’ve never been anywhere else except in the moment!

According to some, like Adyashanti, the real trick is that the mind can obscure our perception of reality. As he and others say, It’s not about getting somewhere, it’s about exploring what’s blocking our perception of reality right NOW in this moment.

One hurdle is pleasure.

We all know about the ego and its enslavement to the pain/pleasure principle. On one side of the coin the issue is that Being is inherently pleasurable. On the other side, the issue is separation from Being is suffering.

So, when Being is obscured, pain and suffering color the consciousness. The ego-self wants to fix it by getting what’s missing, to get there, to get into the moment with that pleasurable, suffering-free experience.

“Getting” (seeking) is the foundational orientation of the self. It’s future oriented. All of its hopes, dreams and desires are out there in the future, but all of that wishing and dreaming is happening in the moment.

For a moment let’s entertain the self’s orientation and explore just how confused it is about reality and the journey.

Here is the timeline of your life:

To the self, enlightenment is located in time somewhere between where you are and the end of time and it needs to get there, to get it. But, the enlightened say, “Enlightenment is exactly where you are right now, in this moment.”

Here’s a more accurate illustration of the self’s position on the timeline of your life and its relationship to reality.

The green field is Being or awareness or consciousness. It underlies and permeates your entire existence. In fact, it’s all Being, through and through. It has no extension in time, it has always been and always will be. It’s pure, complete, perfect and timeless.

The dots after birth represent the period in time where your body existed, but your “self” did not. The sense of you developed. It takes five to seven years after birth. It’s a process.

Once the self is constructed, it inserts itself into all of your (body/Being) experience claiming that it has always been in your life and has had something to do with everything in your life, your entire history is its claim. It believes it makes choices, thinks, takes action, etc.

These things happen, but not from or by the self. It claims ownership in a nano, nano, nano, nano second after the event. It’s so fast, it’s pretty much instantaneous. So fast, the mind can’t register it. Neuroscience is validating this.

We believe the self is needed to function in the world. It’s not and you’re living proof of that because you (body/Being) did just fine for several years without the self. Our beliefs and convictions on the necessity of the self for functioning are misunderstandings and ignorance of what’s really going on.

Invest some sincerity and impeccability in this exercise:

Pull out some old photos of you from 5-years-old back to birth. Spend some time with each and allow memories and stories to come forward. Be with the sense of yourself as you ponder them. Feel the feelings, sensations and energies. Observe the thoughts and felt sense of being in that time.

What’s your earliest memory? Can you feel the familiar sense of “you” in your past? How far back in your life as you look at the pictures can you get a sense of “you”? 5? 4? 3? 2? 1?

When you look at those baby pictures, do you get a connected sense of you at that moment that extends forward in time to now?

Here’s the point – you, the self, didn’t exist back then. The closer you get to five or six, the more you, the self, wafts into and out of existence, but it’s not stable until six or so.

That two-year-old toddling around, eating, speaking the first words, sleeping, crying, doing all the things we do at two is pretty much doing it all without the self and it’s all happening in a developmentally appropriate way. The self will assert that it’s needed to mature, develop potential and function. This is true to some extent, but it’s a lease situation not a purchase. It’s time to terminate the lease agreement.

The point is that, if anything, enlightenment in terms of “getting” it from the self’s orientation is not in the future, it’s in the past prior to the self. The self is heading in the wrong direction! Talk about confused!

Working with object relations and psychodynamics is a regressive process. It peels the onion, removing the layers history, beliefs and identifications. This process can feel like going back in time to a priori, but is really a process that allows what is present, but obscured to emerge into consciousness.

What psychodynamics allow us to do is study what we’re not. As an orientation or process, this allows us to get off the treadmill to the future and bring our attention and awareness to our immediate experience. Of course, the self will want to coopt the study of what we’re not to “get something out of it” and continue moving toward the future, but we can pull the treadmill out from under the self by exploring that very thing.

If we hear and understand Adyashanti’s, Tolle’s, Almaas’s, and others’ message, it serves us better to get off the treadmill and explore the moment we’re always in.

The Power of Object Relations

This is where working with object relations really rewards us because doing so is one of the most elegant and efficient means of “rending the veils.” We could spend ten, twenty, thirty years or more meditating to pierce what’s in the way or we could avail ourselves of psychodynamic spiritual technology that can do so in days or weeks.

This is not to say embodied enlightenment will arise in short order, but one can experience and embody presence and spiritual states as part of a process of working through conditioning, which produces positive effects in our day-to-day life.

At first, the effects and affect of essence and essential qualities arising in the body/mind are “my” experience, as the claiming is that fast. It takes some time before we recognize experience as happening in the soul and see the body/mind as the agency of perception, extension and expression.

Again, the string we need to work with is right here, right now because the nature of reality is continuous revelation.

Here’s the core issue with the self and enlightenment:

Self cannot get out of self.

It’s really simple. Every action of self reinforces self. How then, can self get out of self?

When you’re meditating, if you’re orienting toward some goal, or preference, or the future – that is the self meditating. This is how meditation begins for everyone.

Speaking of meditation, what is successful meditation? Being in the NOW? Being full of presence? Some spiritual state? NO, successful meditation is coming back, coming back, coming back… The circuits are being rewired, the smaller pile of sand is growing bigger – more on this later. In thirty minutes of meditation, if you come back once, a hundred times or are gone, gone, gone – that is successful meditation. Putting your butt in the chair is 80%.

The self can explore self, can get curious about experience. What we really are – awareness – evolves, unfolds, disidentifies without getting anything. It emerges from the background into the foreground via space and curiosity as it is – awareness.

Self is self-referencing. It lives in a house of one-way mirrors where it only sees itself, everything reflected in self-centeredness. Self cannot see reality, but reality, self-aware awareness, can see self – it is the seeing, not the seer or the seen.

Here’s an exercise that works better the older you are:

Have you ever looked in the mirror and had a moment of: geez, I don’t feel that old? This is an experience of timeless awareness, what you really are, being aware of itself. It has nothing to do with memory – check it out!

Play around with it. Keep your vision loose. Split your attention 20/80 between the mirror and the seeing, not the seer and the seen. See if the sense of timeless awareness moves more forward into consciousness. Relax, grasping at it, shoos it away.

Up Next…

How Object Relations Control Relating

September 9
Beyond Individual Object Relations
Working with Segments and Structures of the Personality

Working on object relations one at a time will never end. Our intent is to work with them enough so we develop our understanding, skills, and capacities to engage ego structures and personality segments which are built with object relations as the main building blocks.

Working in this way addresses many, many blocks at a time.

Three ways of working on personality segments and structures:
1. Work on the footings: Recognize and experience the rejection or frustration as you explore. Each footing contains many, many experiential building-blocks with a common element: frustration, rejection, fulfillment. In keeping with our examples, working with object relations contributes to the degradation of the entire footing. Once this concept is grasped, you can actually recognize the process in your psyche.
  
  Working on the affect, the bonding agent, loosens the foundation where one pylon of the scaffolding of the self rests. As that support is undermined, the scaffolding compensates by redistributing the load-bearing to other pylons. This may lead to a sense of ruts and cycles unless you notice that the entire structure has shifted and what you’re interacting with has changed.
  
  Working with rejection and frustration will bring into consciousness the real state of affairs – the soul is disconnected, so to speak, from its true nature and ego activity will never be able to replace or recreate the real. Landing in the reality of this shakes the whole structure loose.
1. Incorporate knowledge of the theory of holes and essential qualities into object relations work. You notice the balls of string are multicolored. This represents the individual uniqueness of our ball and its relationship to our developmental history with essential qualities.
  
  WHY? Essential qualities are part and parcel of the soul’s experience. Part of the flow of the soul is the continual effulgence of the essential qualities arising to inform and support the moment-to-moment experience of the soul.
  
  In the Diamond Approach, we work with essential qualities and the specific psychodynamics associated with our personal loss of conscious connection to them. This is where we get our first experiences of working consciously with object relations.
  
  Understanding the relationships between object relations and essential qualities helps to optimize work with our psyche.
  
  The scaffolding of the self is an attempt to recreate or imitate the wisdom and function of specific essential aspects of the soul. With time, you’ll be able to recognize and work with large sections of the structure (represented by the red section in the image below), or ball of string by identifying the ego activity attempting to replace the missing aspect.
  
  Working with object relations reveals how easy it is for the psychodynamic work to “lead” to spiritual states which can result in a couple of challenges:
- The dualistic mind will associate this with cause & effect and organize a theory or strategy of how “use” and “do” with this insight.
- One can develop a dependency or need for psychodynamic work that in turn makes experiencing spiritual states dependent on psychodynamic work.
Working on sections involves:
- Recognize the specific ego activity and its function
  - Let’s use getting angry since our ball has so much red in it.
- Allow the whole psychic constellation associated with it to come forward into consciousness. Imagine a crisp, blue sky. You’re feeling fresh, open and alive. You get angry. Familiar thought patterns and tensions associated with being angry arise. Your affective state changes the look and feel of the clear, crisp sky, your orientation to the future, and more. This is the constellation, the whole shebang. Suddenly, it’s like a cloud all around you, infusing you.
  
  If you catch the change quick enough, you can shift back to before the shift and then shift back into the constellation. If you keep playing with this, you’ll discover amazing insights.
1. There’s a concept in psychology that can serve us here. Another way the mind organizes and stores experience is through affective nuclei. Think of this type of organization like a big set of filing cabinets. Every experience involving anger is thrown into the anger drawer and I mean “thrown” in. It’s not neat and tidy, it’s emotions! It’s messy like the ball of string because any particular interaction in our life might produce a stream of cards to be filed: irritation to anger to hurt to sad to…
  
  The concept of affective nuclei helps explain the phenomena of being triggered and dumping a whole drawer of history into the present situation.
With the information shared thus far, we can employ three-pronged awareness in loosening our ball of string. Included in our awareness are:
1. Current object relation in play
2. Which pillar it rests on
3. The affective nuclei
Our goal is not to get rid of the object relation, the footing or the affective nuclei and we certainly can’t change history. What we do is bring the secret ingredients and let them work the magic – presence and space.

We bring the space through open and open-ended inquiry. It’s an orientation, a curiosity about the bug in front of you. The more we’re open, the more awareness of space comes forward in consciousness. Even when we’re addressing incredibly resistant knots, openness does the work, not us. It may feel like we’re working our ass off to remain open, to get through resistance, denial, subterfuge, distraction and the like, but loosening the knot is actually done by the action of space (read The Void, A. H. Almaas) .

The more capacity we have (expansion of our energetic comfort zone), the more interest we have in space rather than what’s in the space, the greater the invitation for the optimizing force.

Affect is more fundamental to how the mind organizes experience than thoughts, concepts and ideas. Affect gives meaning to the phrase: it’s not your experience that’s important, it’s the experience of your experience that’s important.

Affect and sensation dominated our early experience. When you see a frustrated angry toddler, you witness an organism in its entirety displaying frustration and anger – all body/mind systems are flushed, energized and discharging at full capacity. There is no internal mediating force holding the expression in check.

Opening up and following our affect will lead us down the rabbit-hole to the full impact of the experience on our psyche. Trying to stay ahead of the experience intellectually simply adds to the mess or at least impedes the unraveling.

Being is constantly revealing itself via the soul, the individual consciousness. The soul isn’t worried about the unfoldment. It’s not trying to figure out or prepare for what’s next. It’s in the flow, it is the flow. Every moment is infused with knowledge, goodness and awe, not concerns and anxiety.

In the rabbit-hole is where we find the difficult knots, the ones we can’t pry loose. All we can do is bring the space and allow space to work its magic and shake all hell loose.

Up Next..

Orienting the Work in Time
September 7
The Revenge of No Boundaries

Is permissive parenting responsible for the January 6 insurrection?

Are Baby Boomers responsible for the collapse of civility or was it the television?

Unless the early-development narcissism is eventually disrupted, children continue to feel like the world revolves around them and become narcissistic adults. Parental boundaries allow children to grow up, to understand they can’t always get their way, to be more patient and mature

We seem to have gone from the greatest generation to a country that is a hybrid Gong Show, WWE, Twilight Zone and All the Nasty You can Get for a Buck. How did we get here?

As I sit listening to my neighbors yell at, and threaten their children with consequences that never materialize, my thoughts go to the consequences of a lack of healthy boundaries during childhood.

Is it possible that all that free love, weed, and psychedelics that led to children named Rosebud and Sky Captain also contributed to the downfall of civilization?

While we were shuffling between peace marches and Woodstock, did our free-from-accountability parenting set in motion the end of democracy?

It’s Thursday afternoon. California is is turning into charcoal, the New York subway is the latest remake of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and the bible-belt is now the covid-belt-you-in-the-mouth belt.

I’m just wondering – where did it all begin?

September 2
Optimizing Your Work with Object Relations

What is an Object Relation?

Psychoanalysis definition: a theory describing the relationship felt or the emotional energy directed by the self or ego toward a chosen object.

Simply put, it’s a way the mind perceives, interprets and organizes information – there’s me, there is the other (person, idea, thought, memory, object, etc.) and there is the affective energy that connects me to the other, defining the relationship.

These defined relationships, object relations, begin developing early in life, prior to the capacities for abstract thought and self-reflection. Rudimentary, significant object relations are formed early in our experience and then the mind, interpreting and understanding our stream of experience, for the most part, is simply comparing what’s happening in the moment to something familiar from the past – projecting the past onto the present.

As we develop the capacity for abstract thought and imagining ourselves in events, the mental comparative processes used to ‘understand’ experience begins to usurp experiential exploration as the foundation for the process of understanding. One could see it as a type of mental shorthand to save us time and energy. This is reflected in conversation as well with the ubiquitous use of the word “like” in U. S. culture.

Object relations are the internal building blocks of self-identity.

Let’s talk about the celebrity in this drama – YOU.

The Self

Self – one’s cognitive and affective representation of one’s own identity

Drop the concept of true/false self for a while and simply associate the term self with your historical familiar sense of you.

Though we all have this “sense of self,” it, in fact, does not exist as anything more than a composite of memories, in short it is nothing more than a memory aggregate incorporated into present experience.

We’re going to explore the state of affairs we find ourselves in after normal ego development and a few decades of living. We’ll be looking at this from a view of process and we’ll be using some simple concepts to enhance understanding.

Unraveling

All of us have probably had the experience of untangling string and knots. It takes patience and stick-to-itiveness – perseverance. In addressing this ball of knotted history and identity we are going to need PATIENCE and STICK-to-ITIVENESS!

I don’t know about you, but there were times, in frustration, I said – to hell with it – and got out the scissors, but that won’t work in this situation because psychologically trying to cut the string is really just weaving another thread into the existing mess.

Frustration just pulls on a thread tightening the knots and adding more tension to the entire ball. Most of us have experience with a knot or two that was unmovable – think of that in terms of psychic knots and the amount of resistance and constriction it takes to maintain certain knots.

This is the beauty of understanding object relations – when you understand the process and the simple secret of unwinding the mess, it helps to support perseverance and patience. And, though challenges remain, a sense of joy and aliveness arise in our process.

Here is one of the secrets of engaging this process optimally:

Anyone who has untangled a ball of string knows that as you untangle each section or length of string, no matter how small, more space arises in the mess making progress easier and easier.

Often the first hurdle is finding an end to start with and that’s one of the beauties of object relations, you can start right where you are because the end of the most appropriate string is right here in this moment – in your present experience, even if your present experience is “nothing.”

Here is another powerful secret: as progress is made, give more and more attention to the space than to the mess of string. From experience, you may know that when the tangled mess includes more space, you can almost shake the rest of it free.

The power of space is something we will come back to, but let’s move on to our next illustration.

Constructing the Self

The Linchpin of an Object Relation

Maintaining Structural Integrity

Each of us has a range of energy/tension that helps define us. If it gets dialed-down or amped-up, we go to work consciously or unconsciously to get back into our comfort zone. This comfort zone is a big factor in the inner-child structure which we will discuss later.

But, it’s also a huge biological factor in regards to homeostasis and the charge/discharge regulation of our body.

So, we can’t get around working with affect and energy which can be challenging when our radio station is broadcasting doom and gloom and take shelter 24/7.

Another helpful hint:

In service of patience and perseverance, assume that your involvement with object relations is never going to end. Our normal mind is a comparative mind and affect is part of its filing system. The organizing system is not the problem, identifying with the content, the object relations is the problem.

You can’t stop the mind from doing what it does – interpreting what is perceived and taking action in terms of how it relates to the body (organ of perception) and this dimension of experience.

Up next…

Beyond Single Object Relations: Working with Segments and Structures of the Personality

August 29
Hacking YOUR Orientation to Reality

Where you’re looking from can be the issue

Beliefs, mental conditioning, attitudes, habits and the like aren’t the only elements in the human experience that need to be addressed on the journey of realization. There are issues, barriers and challenges and then there are ISSUES, BARRIERS and CHALLENGES that need attention, inquiry and work.

As an example ego reactivity is an issue that needs exploration, but taking ourselves to be a separate individual is an ISSUE that needs exploration. ISSUES are more fundamental, more subtle and more entrenched than issues – and we all know how relentless issues can be.

Another ISSUE that will arise at some point is the habit of orienting from being in a body. Think about it – you’re always facing forward.

Have you ever wondered about that?

Have you ever considered the fact that the soul has no such orientation? There is no front or back, up or down, in or out in pure consciousness.

Our biological orientation helps to constrain the freedom of our consciousness and possibilities.

Another element in this is vision. Our eyes face forward. More than 50 percent of the cortex, the surface of the brain, is devoted to processing visual information. It makes sense that our ingrained orientation to our experience is forward-facing.

It’s no big surprise

No wonder we’re always ‘looking’ at our experience. When asked: “What’s happening now?,” How often do we find ourselves looking at our experience to answer that question?

So, we’re separate from our experience and looking at it from a forward facing orientation, which is usually located in the head looking down or in.

Duh? So what?

Say, you’re meditating. Which way are you facing internally? How much are your eyes involved in your focus or concentration?

You see, the habit of the biology has been imbued into the experience of our soul. This is a very powerful form in the soul that needs to be worked with to free the soul’s potential.

Working with this happens little by little, indirectly through long-term meditation and spiritual practice, but making it obvious allows us to work with it more directly and since it is more fundamental than most psychological and emotional content, more freedom, flexibility and resilience in this area will ripple out into other structures and patterns.

Stepping away from your eyes

We can start working with our fixated vision and forward-facing orientation by stepping away from our eyes in meditation. Our eyes are closed, so we don’t need to look in the direction of our nose. Since our meditation practice includes not following thought or images that arise, we don’t need to ‘face’ anything internally.

In fact, we don’t even need to be in the head because awareness is everywhere and the eyes can’t look everywhere at once – try it. Looking everywhere at once is good exercise itself.

If you simply play around with the notion of this, eventually a moment or two and then more will arise when you’re not facing anywhere. It’s novel. I found that the trick was in the play, in the lightheartedness and not taking it on as a project, but as a curiosity.

Working from bed or the zafu

When I was working with out-of-the-body experience, I began exploring ‘turning around in my body’ as a way of loosening the ties with it. Unbeknownst to me, this actually began challenging “facing my experience,” eventually leading to the 360-degree experience of the soul.

The 360 degree orientation of the soul isn’t circular (two-dimensional) or spherical (three-dimensional) because it includes inter and intra dimensional. So, it’s every-which-way at once or directionless.

Lie in bed on your back. As you lay there just close your eyes, relax, turn over in your body, and look through the bed at the floor. At first, you’re just imagining it, but if you stay with it, a more kinesthetic sense of it will arise in awareness (awaring) – confusion is most likely to arise as to which way the body is actually facing.

As I said, have fun with it. Be like a little kid, don’t go out and play to have (create) fun. Let the fun extend and express itself in the play – put your head where your feet are!

If you’re sitting or meditating, simply turn around in your body while you sit. Your body is facing one way, you’re facing 180 degrees the other way.

If and when, you feel tension in the head or body – YOU’RE NOT PLAYING! Relax, this isn’t JOB One.

Leave questions and comments below about your play time.

Leaving you with a quote from A. H. Almaas, Diamond Heart Book 4

When you see how fundamental, how pervasive, how deep and entrenched your physical orientation is, you will notice that you don’t look at even your deep experiences from a total perspective. You look at them from the perspective of the body, from the physical perspective. Most of your issues arise from that perspective. When you feel that you are disappearing, what is it that is disappearing? Usually, it’s the image of your body You are terrified because you believe your physical body is the most important, fundamental, lasting real, fundamental, solid you. If that goes, you go. You don’t think, “I’m just seeing myself from a different place. My perception is detaching from the physical senses, and as a result, I am seeing something deeper than the physical.” If you do see it that way, you won’t feel that you are disappearing. You will be aware that you are not just seeing through your physical senses. Then there will be no fear, and no reason for the terror. So the source of the terror is our belief that the physical body is who we are—fundamentally and ultimately.

August 14
A Charmed Life (Good Fortune)

The charm of life is your good fortune

It is life which charms, which is attractive.
What we are always seeking for is life.

As a poet has said, ‘The heart of man, if once expanded, becomes larger than all the heavens’. The deep thinkers of all ages have therefore held that the only principle of awakening to life is the principle of emptying the self. In other words, making oneself a clearer and more complete accommodation in order to accommodate all experiences more clearly and more fully. The tragedy of life, all its sorrows and pains, belong mostly to the surface of the world. If one were fully awake to life, if one could respond to life, if one could perceive life, one would not need to look for wonders, one would not need to communicate with spirits; for every atom in this world is a wonder when one sees with open eyes.

Good Fortune

Runs in my veins

Every heartbeat a blessing

What wonder

This journey of love and tears

In rapture and lust

I have thrown my arms

Around so much life

Relished and savored the bitter and sweet

Now, my embraces

Are much more delicate

My astonishment – soft and exquisite

Dear One

If you travel further

Than the tip of your nose

You have gone too far

To kiss what is

Truly Precious

What the world is seeking, what human souls yearn for, is that life, whether it comes through music, color, lines, or words. What everyone desires is life. It is life which is the real source of healing. What is really needed is the life which comes from the expanded consciousness, from the realization of the divine Light which is the secret of all true art, and which is the soul of all mysticism.

Quotes are from Volume II of The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan.

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January 11