Biofocusing, stories about the universe, and beyond.

Biofocusing, as I have said before, has a lot to do with paying attention. Now I'm going to take it a step further, and say that it's also about creating attention.

When we pay attention to something, we give it enough importance to get real. Take Facebook, for example. Once upon a time it was only an idea but now it's fundamental to many daily behaviours. Or, one single item of behaviour, like an assassination, becomes a world, even an historic moment. An epic story is contextualised around that one finger pulling the trigger that sends the bullet to the target.

When attention is paid, a story is created. The more attention paid, the greater the chance of credibility. And therein lies the rub. Stories and the sense of reality impinge upon each other. The trouble with this adjunction is that people commit themselves to both the story and the sense of reality it brings without realizing, as a hypnotist would know for sure, that whatever story you tell, there's another that is just as true.

The sense of truth itself, is merely that: a sense of truth, and the truth of that is that it can always be improved upon.

Before anyone shoots me (I'm not in the league of those worth assassinating) here are the points I want to make:

stories reflect self-conscious management, usually poorly executed

the stories that arrive in book form cheat time, the subjective-objective split and run the risk of being regarded as discrete enities, like numbers

stories that arrive as movies do the same, but popcorn dampens the overall effect

stories that have not been released by the human organism into communal domain are privately motivated, the power of which is gravely underestimated

stories that are released into communal domain, no matter how selective or all-embracing such domain may be, are mostly granted the status of being real, largely because of obeying linguistic rules

stories that are told in a serious tone tend to be taken seriously 

stories that are told humourously tend to be taken humourously

stories that are told authoratatively command esteem more easily than others.

Tone, an important element of which is volume, sets much.

The universe began with a big, loud bang.

Oh, it did, did it? I've read about the evidence for that story, and then found another story, for which, apparently, there is also evidence. This one says that the universe is breathing in and out.

The truth, which is a collapsible word, is that no-one knows for sure. Are we entirely thwarted in the mission for a grand grasp of our existence? The cosmologists are not going to agree, for the time being. Then there are those who go another way, and suggest, demand, require, kill us if we don't agree with an already recipe-d story, which is the way of general religion, expecially the crazy, fervent ones, the emotional glue of which is alarmingly sticky in current times. We may be living in what is a definitely post-reasoning world if we can't find a way to de-enthuse fervency and expose it for what it is: synaptic overkill, physiologically and literally.

For too long a time I believed what people had told me about the Bible,and I tried to work my way into all the stories set out there, until I made the effort to sort out something understandable for myself. The fear of hell which was drummed into me before I could think for myself was quite a tough one to chuck, but in the end this simplicity held:

Be more than your instincts because you are more.

The "more", I discovered is entirely negotiable. It's a story you get to author yourself. The odd thing is that once you start authoring for real, sync happens.

If you describe your beginnings, you'll go back to mom and dad, early memories, what was going on around you, a bit of objective history, in retrospect, that really truthful stuff collated, corroborated and communciated which makes it all for real. You got into an organic but badly-languaged world, and listened to the words, and got hypnotized by the tones. The thing about thrillers is that they keep the same tone, but take off every now and then to go a little bit deep, strike an instinct and come back.

So I was born, and my story began. Let's try again. I began before I let myself get pulled in once again. This truly pitiful level of consciousness called human is a wail in the cosmic night. Who can resist? It's supposed to work right, and fit in with the beautiful world to which it belongs, but it's a total fuck up. The Bible uses the word "sin". It means that the arrow didn't hit the target. The assassin missed, but that's my version. Don't mess with the truth.

Bottom line: truth is created, never owned, and humans have the opportunity to create.  Because they aren't so clever, they quickly drop to instinct.

Now for the big one: love. Is it bigger than instinct or just an empty word?

Well, check the wind for movement. The eternal waft, and certainly it's there, you might try to fool your own mind, but your mind isn't there to fool anyone, least of all you.

Last time you checked for truth, how was it?

Note to self. becoming non-self: you're gonna die.Perhaps comfortably, holding hands with family, perhaps really sore, hurting, anguished, tortured. Screaming.

Then what?

You then lose you. All your organic stuff starts to work. What your body is, is something else, but going another way.

So let's tell another story. Let's say that there's more going on than we can say, but we'll try to say it.

God save human consciousness. But who is God? And how does God work?

Who do we choose to listen to?

Science will try a certain  kind of story, religion another. A third option:

just tell the story, and let it tell itself through you, no control of how it goes, it will link up the way it does, the way worlds and wills match is so different to what we think:

Humans are cruel, abominably cruel, that's how it is. It's in their corpuscles, cells, and neuroreceptors. They fail to kill that old enemy, the false self, as soon as it stands. They haven't the heart to assassinate their weakness. They believe in their own strength, forgetting to honour their source.

Why?

It all comes from a random mind that could be focused, but the motivation to focus waits, wanting something that reduces the access to something less:

there are worlds and universes waiting to land on our human platform, humble though it should be.

We have grown blunt, we need to re-recognize the drama in which we participate. As many as possible will create a new season. The issue is to recognize it.

Biofocusing, beliefs, narratives, meta-narratives and magical thinking

Focusing on purpose, because you're alive, have a curious mind, an alert awareness and a sense of wanting to move wholistically is more than a mental concentration. It's also an emotional manouvre, a spiritual crisis - and the subtlety thereof doesn't lessen the crisis - a personal imperative, and evidence of collective change.

Let's list the things that make complete sense even though they go against the flow of accepted consensus:

awareness and consciousness link far and wide, across this planet and beyond, even as far as worlds and spheres we can't comprehend

material sensibility is a persistent illusion

solitary experience is notional, who knows what kind of junction happens because of human skin?

what you believe doesn't make it so

no story is cast in eternal stone

consciousness arises from neither birth nor body, and does not decay on death

the five senses create a natural focus which is more of a constraint that a clarity

intuition and imagination offer paths to a para-natural clarity for which there is plenty of evidence:if you don't accept this, it's because you don't want to

authoratarian religion doesn't make it authoratative

authoratative science is attitudinal and can't be actual, nothing works for everybody all the time, and if you keep an open mind about laws, watch what happens

the games that adults play are deadly whereas the games that children play are creative

heaven (or the lack thereof) isn't waiting for you, it's in the moment of the here and now

the story that you tell yourself about your life is always insufficient

the story that others tell you about your life is always insufficient

more than you realize is always happening

if you haven't created your sense of self on purpose, it's been constructed for you by others

life and death aren't opposites, you're alive now, if you're reading this, and you're even more alive than you think, in respect of never coming to an end, even when your body stops working

grief is evidence of ignorance

and so on, and so on......you must have the drift by now.

The meta-narrative is that kind of consciousness into which we grow whereas narratives are accounts by which we make sense of experiences. Consciousness is not merely cerebral. Most of it is emotional awareness and highly volatile. Belief is about making an holistic commitment which can be particlarly unhappy if you commit to something which won't do you any good in the long run, like a spouse who has no congruence with you, a job that you can't do, a goal that damages humankind in the core, like sheer profiteering, or religious fanaticism.

Biofocusing finds the way between a tightly controlled mind and a free-ranging awareness. Our acts of consciousness have not been definitvely listed: emotional intelligence has helped to balance the scales, and every other kind of intelligence has been brought up, too.

The big issue is that we'll never be able to objectify that marvellous thing called the consciousness of the mind, which is a tautology, even before you start. The language - consciousness continuum is something of a red herring: tell me what you believe, and I'll show you your magical thinking.

Emerson offered the advice to take the path away from man, not to man. Humankind isn't the centre of anything except the greed for money and a genuis for cruelty. It really is beyond time to wake up and move from this to something better.

Heaven is now, and it's better to co-operate rather than argue over words, fight about emotional platforms and kill for beliefs.

But how do we know what heaven is communicating and doing? The politicians are almost entirely rubbish (I'm thinking of that South American president who drives a Beetle -only him - as the exception), the preachers are mostly rubbish, the academics don't know the difference between rubbish, business leaders thrive on rubbish, so how could we recognize the gleam of heaven seeking to glow through the narrative of our lives?

Go to the magical moments of your life. Insert the pictures. I have many. A golden sunset on Chapman's Peak Drive. A descent through the mist from Alleheiligeberg in Switzerland. Moments of rare warmth between friends. A knowing of deep acceptance. An intense recognition by a stranger. Grace in many unexpected, undeserved places. A walk with a dog.

Biofocusing will, I hope, come into its own, just as psychotherapy did. It's purpose, as I think of it, is to popularize a depth of honesty, to create a path for experience to say something new to the world we now find around ourselves. We have never created the ground on which we stand, but we have certainly created how we communciate about everything, without stopping to sense the greater communication of which we are part.

What changes the world is not necessarily the grand plan, it's the daily movement not of twenty-four hours but of conscious awareness infusing and suffusing human corpuscles, bringing the dream from where it used to be to where it's going. Our co-operation means very much more than we think. But we know that, anyway.

The Risen Christ and Tortured Mice

Since this is Easter I have been thinking about approaching one's very core in respect of learning about the praxis of biofocusing. I've worked on this notion for some years now, and some very surprising things have fallen into place. One is that the majority of people don't enjoy approaching the core of who they are. They might even say they do, but they don't. A lot of folk live a lifestyle of entertaining themselves and distracting themselves, not going too near the core because the core isn't deemed to be relevant. Even more folk live trying to survive on a daily basis, and I don't mean emotionally. They have to hunt for food and water.

But what is the "core"?

It has to do with what you prioritise and what prioritises you. These two perspectives contain the active and passive aspects of bio-focusing: focusing on your aliveness, and focusing from what makes you alive.

Philosophising about being alive isn't the purpose. Responding to being alive is more like it. I grew up in a conservative, evangelical Christian environment where my real response to anything was unacceptable from the word go. They taught me that unless I got saved I would go to hell. They assured me that if Jesus returned, and I wasn't saved, the rest of my family would be raptured away, and I would be left behind for the devil to sort out. Frequently, before I was eight years old, I tip-toed down the passage, alarmed by the silence, fearing that the end had come, and went to my parents' bedroom to find out if I could hear them breathing in their sleep. For most of my life I have struggled to come to grips with that terror.

I have come to realise that the story of Jesus shouldn't have that effect on anyone who seriously studies it. Last year I found myself facing that old terror head on. It has taken me a full year to recover, but I will never be the same again. All my life I have been learning flat-out so as to manage that terror by sheer cogitation. I failed in that endeavour. That stark fear had been managed, not eradicated. By coming at the story of Jesus from every angle I could find, I desperately wanted to control the fear that the story produced in me. I became an expert in narratology, a professor of literature and a multi-disciplinary academic of some repute in a few small circles of academia. None of this helped.

Jesus doesn't hurt anybody. People do, and even when they mean well. Were my parents bad people? Absolutely not. Did they mean well? They did. Then why did they mould my emerging emotions into such terror and rage? They had no idea that this was happening. How could that be possible? Because they were responding to being alive in respect of being focused by where they came from. They didn't come from an easy era or comfortable family backgrounds: two world wars, the Depression, a father lost early in life, a mother lost early in life, being shunted around from pillar to post as a child, going from house to house, fianlly being brought up by an aunt because of a father who felt it was his mission to travel the world to save Catholics from a lost eternity, beginning with Spain and ending in Chile.

Many default emotions are destructive, having been set up quite unconsciously. The consequences can last a life-time. I have been fortunate. I won't go into too much detail in how I understand the story of Jesus now, but the following statement is relevant: the Spirit of the Risen Christ is for real, and this Easter I am prepared to state my commitment the felt reality of this.  The words are inadequate to describe what I mean. The idea that we get one shot at being alive and then it's heaven or hell is plain wrong. Goethe said that he had been around a few times and expected plenty more. It doesn't happen in a row. Read the blog on focusing on time. Read Eben Alexander. Read Brian Weiss. Read Mira Kelley. Read the Bible. Read what you're taken to, and let your neurons do the processing and make the connections. The Spirit of the Risen Christ doesn't belong in a church which is usually the heart of utter boredom and pretence. The Spirit of the Risen Christ is utterly intermingled with the sub-atomic surprises of each atom of your body, long before the molecules and cells do their thing. The Spirit of the Risen Christ is more you than you realize. And no magical thinking is required. Amputation of intelligence is also not required. Best of all, you don't have to become a Christian and adopt a role.

It's unfortunate that the Christians have not been that good at setting forth the story of Jesus and proclaiming Christ. In fact, quite a few of them have been downright vicious, cruel, malicious and evil in the ways they have used, edited, re-written and otherwise manipulated the Good News. Yet the story remains, and has a lot to do with aliveness, which is the core of bio-focusing.

The lesson in all this is that the good we intend and the good we do are not always the same thing. What we focus on as priority has its birth in a pattern of emotionality which is a mix of chosen attitude and default attitude. While parents may urge children along the path of what they believe to be good and true while actually harming them, politicians almost always encourage nations towards self-destruction, and we still play the voting games. The science of medicine has made huge progess which has helped millions and millions of lives out of misery and early death, yet experimentation has depended on torturing mice as well as other animals.

C.S. Lewis once explained that the fastest way forwards might be the longest way back, and in many cases, personal freedom can only be achieved if you go back to where the wool got tangled, and take the time and find the energy to make the way straight.

I don't believe it's possible to achieve this on your own. Emotions can reach pitch-dark places such as in the cockpit of an aircraft which is taking everyone on board to their deaths on purpose, and on beaches where ISIS followers decapitate captives. The spirit of humanity needs to be rediscoverd in the Spirit of Christ before humanity disappears for ever, and this can happen only on a volunatry basis, by listening to personal stories which have not dared to surface for one reason or another. 

Instead of freezing me into fear and terror, the people who influenced me in such a way should have encouraged me to go forth, be fruitful and multiply over all the earth. But who can tell what might have happened to me then?

As I have come to understand, the Spirit of the Risen Christ, moves us towards humility and compassion and gives us the power to make miracles happen. If someone were to challenge me by asking me which is the more important, the life of a mouse or the life of a human, my answer would be that life is indivisible. Like Nicholas Berdyaev, I believe that there is no such thing as individual salvation. The soul of planet earth is one, and the message of Easter includes the reality of freedom from personal trauma and the recogntion of a greater purpose.

Focusing on the illusion of time.

It's been pointed out by a number of people that time is an illusion. The measuring units of seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years and millenia are inventions, not discoveries, and actually do not work exactly. We run out of, or into, moments every so often, and the last one I heard about was when the Japanese added or subtracted a second to a year not long ago. The Swiss were too busy to get involved.

It's okay to joke about these kinds of things, but the implications are huge. What we believe about time changes everything. In the Western world, you begin at birth or conception, move along a straight line of so many days, and then die. End of line. Christians say that you begin at birth, or conception, live for three score and ten years, and then go to heaven or hell, and you get one shot at either of these two, and as my Irish friend told me, if you miss it, it's a total miss. The Eastern way of belief holds you may come and go many times. I am over-generalising, of course, but the point is that each one is born into a way of thinking about time and eternity.

I am happy to concede that time is an illusion. My watch, which is so Swiss that it's face is a franc, is one of my favourite things. I like to be punctual, and I like things to work on time. Yet I am aware that being born on a planet with specifications that connect with a solar system and sidereal dynamics immediately takes me out of the time system and into a multiversal anti-system. Goethe made the remark that he was convinced that he had been around and would come around very many times, and that was still within the solar -system time-dynamic.

I find it weird that so much that has happened on this planet is taken for granted. I lie awake at night trying to fathom out how organisms could have become independently mobile. What on earth happened to result in the crust of the earth to make coagulations of breathing dust independently mobile and thereafter capable of believing that each one is an isolation, and inevitably entrapped in sixty seconds a minute at the expense of very much else?

It's one thing to think about time being an illusion, it's another to notice that it actually is an illsion.

Some of the implications of no time are the following:

"time is money" is folly of the most short-sighted kind

no-one begins at conception and no-one ceases to be at death

a sense of reality based on a sense of time is reversible

urgency is not about time as much as it is about requirement

eternity doesn't come after death, it's right now

eternity doesn't come before birth, it's right now

when the heart communicates, it's away and out of time

and the most telling one of all:

what you experience now, contains what God the Creator imparts to you.

Alertness gets out of the line of time, inasmuch as time isn't a line a but something tangential to the vastness of eternal living which is what we are part of. Not hard to grasp, but business and belief don't want to go there. Biofocusing focuses from and on being eternally alive. A Christian jingle won't verbalise that kind of living from the core of the core, neither will the commitment to the malevolence of ISIS do so. You don't have anything to add to livingness except for your alert attention, which, when emotionally integrated and intellectually adept, conveys a vaulable  commitment, the activity of which is relative to who you are and where you are. I can't include "when"you are, because we're saying that time is an illusion. But the spirit of any era is real: spirit defines time, in that sense, and you may enjoy it, or are called to witness against it, as the case may be. The spiral will tell you all about it. The one-liners are for jokers.

On earth as it is in heaven

I saw the movie, and read the book. The Bible, that is, quite a few times, as a child. It was terrifying, comforting, alarming, confusing, challenging, And the people who took it as their compass were no better off in respect of intellectual clarity than those who ignored it entirely, although they did have a kind of courage, as they squared up to living and dying, that impressed me.

The idea of heaven is a Christian one, I think. Nirvana, Bliss, the hereafter, there are many names for that other 99.999999999 % of our being which is other than on this planet. There are also those who speak of hell, but I prefer not to go there at all, not even in contemplation.

When you learn to focus, it's wise though difficult to take that huge percentage into account. The awkward truth is that you hav to go through the needle's eye to get some inkling of it, and being the earthbound animals that we are, supper, cash, sex, soccer, image, action and interest - the connecting one as well as the capital-driven one - keep us in our habits of perception, purpose and pain-avoiding tactics.

The pain-avoiding tactics are the most illuminating signals of that huge percentage, which for the purposes of this blog, is my term for heaven. I do not believe in heaven, so to speak. I have no option but to accept that huge percentage and to try to focus my being accordingly.

I don't think it's possible for any thinking person to continue to assume that one's life is a random, meaningless event. Everything that's rational, reasonable and even tested points the other way. Read Lynne McTaggart's The Field, The Intention Experiment and The Bond to check this out. There's plenty to more to read but this would do for That Huge Percentage 101.

The other thing to do is stop the pain-avoiding tactics and see what happens.

The most prevalent and poignant kind of pain that I know of arises from the fear of separation that death brings. The fear is not only of losing loved ones, but of being cut off , verily, from love and belonging, per se. It's a horrible one, worse than going to the dentist. Whereas you previously managed to pre-occupy yourself with daily business, suddenly, abruptly, frighteningly everything is up close and personal and there's no avoiding the huge and overwhelming emotions. There are no answers, not even questions. It's not like a fierce dog or a dangerous situation that you can understand and fear. Liam Neeson, talking about losing his wife, said it was as though evey now and then, the world goes lop-sided and is no longer a safe place to be. The problem is the total incomprehensibility of it all, not merely conceptually, but to the emotional extremes.

When you learn to focus, it's not as though you control the focus. It's more like learning to go with the energy that focuses you to the extent that you allow.

There's a yin and yang to language, one side being incisive articulation, the other being utterly obtuse and overwhelming emotions. The clarity of language does not express the desperate wail. But if you will accept and even embrace the overwhelmingness of the heart, and that is what I understand the heart to be, the point of contact between the material and the spiritual, human and para-human, the minute and that huge percentage, heaven and earth, you will experience new energy. Coaches like pithy things to remember. Here's one: Here Exists the Art of Reality and Truth. If you can bear to be in that space, you will catch up with focus: emotional, intellectual and volitional.

Immobilisation at the dark end of the tunnel happens when the structures and systems that we have created control us. Cars crash, toilets leak, money is taxable, education is politicized, health policed, criminals victimized, art vandalized, thinking dominated, decision delayed. The heart learns to hesitate.To me, this is the very opposite of heaven. I have a huge wild fig tree. This is the season when it drops hundred of thousands, perhaps millions of little hard, squashy figlets that mess up the garden for a period. To me, the fecundity of nature reflects the generosity of heaven. Out there in space, way beyond our control or grasp, black holes do their thing, and white light re-visits what will ultimately be clear to our fear-dominated minds. I find comfort in the mad number of stars, world within worlds, the unimaginable houses of heaven. I find the love of generosity liberating. The people who taught me to look for heaven and fear hell also taught me to give. I am grateful. I believe that if there is one thing that frees the captive mind it is the magic of learning to give, materially, emotionally, spiritually. One does not give only by giving out, or giving away. One sends out one's own generosity of heart, whatever the gift is, no matter how simple or sophisticated. This is our daily bread.

It's said that we become what we focus on. Strangely, we don't pay enough attention to that on which our hearts focus. Many things move me, yet I realize that one of the ways in which heaven moves things on earth is through generosity.

Succintly, generosity brings heaven to earth. Go the other way towards greed, fear, cruelty and deceit. It's clear enough.

Focusing on stories

When I was a child I loved stories. I was blessed to have an Aunty Carol at home, a kind of Mary Poppins figure who came into my life before I was conscious, and died of cancer when I was twelve. She told me stories, often the same ones again and again because I begged her to do so. They were the best kind: imagined live, well-known, with some new twists every now and then, recurring characters, but enough of them to aborb new ones into the circle, and always the expectation of excitement as well as tension.

I woke up one morning when I was five and found I could read. I was drawn to books almost ferociously: when I was ten, during a cold winter's day at Gordon's Bay I read "Wuthering Heights" and while hardly grasping the deeper layers of narrative, I was instinctively drawn to the atmospheric intensity, and the themes that ran with them.

When I turned thirteen my own story hit me like an express train, right in the solar plexus, and I have been trying to find ways to tell it to myself ever since.
So intrigued was I by the powerful effects of narrative, that when I was about fifteen I made an important career decision. I figured that if I identified with one particular hat for work purposes, that was all I would wear, and that would be severely restricting. So I decided that I would teach literature, and thus be available to experience, vicariously, all the roles available in all the stories possible.

Thus I became a teacher, and learnt quite quickly that the teaching profession itself is a difficult story. You bumped your head against political purpose rather than the joy of open minds, you struggled with bullying hierarchies, mindless admin., distracted students, in short, all the ironies of living that come disguised as education.

I worked hard, learned as much as I could, and made it to university level as professor of English. After some years, the story of my own life interrupted me, and took me on to where I am now.

If you are to coach the mind, your own or any other, narrative is probably the most powerful tool.
I thnk that we always instinctively need to find a vehicle for our words, sentences and paragraphs, and the context that we choose, mostly unconsciously, is the story that pops out, cued by the dramas of and in our lives.

We do not focus consciously on the dramas in and of our lives: they happen on a daily and weekly basis, and the big ones like love and death come unheralded.

We pass dangerous places in our lives, and when these happen to us, we need a myth, a living story to word us past these places.

One of the most helpful books I have read, in this connection, is Rollo May's "The Cry For Myth".
At the core, we require a living story that makes sense of living for us.

Fortunately, a way of objectifying stories, even living stories, has been invented: the book.

A book can be a dangerous thing because it both objectifies and formalises a story, or any other set of ideas, and establishes a weird link between objectivity and subjectivity, just as our bodies do.

We believe our existence because we experience our bodies. We believe books in respect of the claims they make, from recipes to salvation.

However, no story has a neat beginning and a definite ending. From fantasy to history to sensationalism to cosmology, you can always find contextual links and personal fascination.

Stories are not merely personal. They also reflect the ultimacy of human meaning. Applied to business, they can work to great effect. Applied to history, they establish knoiwledge. Aspiring to faith, they create genuine steps.

They begin at beginnings that are not new.

They end at places that enter the greatest story of stories.

It has been my quest to find that story, and to know it when I find it, and that quest has brought me to a place where there are two mats before the entrance. The instruction is not to wipe my shoes but to take them off and read, as if for the first time in my life: humility and love.

The intensity that struck me as a teenager is worded by what these two morphemes convey. Put together, a third quickly arrives: compassion.

If we follow the intent and energy of the stories that want to go somewhere, and aren't just for entertainment, we will progress to the felt meanings of these words.

These are intense matters of the heart, and if you allow it, your feet may stay on the mats, as a welcome, rather than an entrance.

The entrance is better than a thousand welcomes, if you know your host as well as your best friend, your beloved, your Lord. The focus at this point goes through the eye of the needle, but is worth it.

Befriending the snake within

It's a remarkable snake. Academics try to touch its tail, hypnotists try to stare it in the eye, preachers rail against it, visionaries look to it for direction, healers know it as strong medicine.

You can try to tame it with words, and it is able to hibernate for aeons, but it knows about the Alpha and the Omega, and stretches the length between these points, undertaking what is for humans, an ultimate mystery.

I considered using the word "serpent" instead of "snake", but that's archaic, and more removed from the dread I'm observing.

Who are we? What are we? And in what kind of universe or universes are we?

I think often of Einstein's remark, that the most salient question is whether or not we live in a friendly universe.

I'm not sure how to answer that. I have read many superficial writings that refer themselves to coaching, about the eight ways of doing this, and the three most important aspects of doing that, and the ten most beautiful things you have learnt this week. There's a difference between tickling the human mind and coaching it, and to do coaching, you have to go for broke, properly.

Coaching will come and go, just as going to your psychologist went. The human mind is there, really there, illusory as the Buddhists would have it, but not really, because when people close to you die, you cry, and when you die, people close to you cry. Feelings feel to be real, and there's no escape from that.

I want to take a closer look at what conscious feeling does:

I find no discontinutity between sensation, feeling, emotion , atttitude, thought and decision.

This is one snake. It's not just inside you, it is you. I picked on the image of snake because it's long, scary, feels different, and brings a sense of dread, which is good for complacent minds.

If you've read Scott Peck's "People of the Lie", you'll have an idea of how the reptilian layers of our physiology are able to make a claim against the later layers. It makes sense to me. My mother is the planet, this dangerous, delicate balance of ecology I am afraid of, would prefer to love, but don't know how to.

If I wish to arise to heaven, I had better know how I arose from this earth. The freedom of one is the the joy of the other: and there is no escape from the bridge between the two.

I often ponder: how did all these life forms emerge? and then the answer comes: it's a dance of the table of elements, which is easy enough to grasp, the reach of physics, which is not easy to grasp, because physics is abstract, the path of logic, which is the strict master of rules, and the romance of reason, which points to an impossible path, and leaves you, the cipher of conscious being, to find the way.

My friend, the snake within, is hungry, indeed starving. Yet I have never felt such a birth waiting,  and I want to know: what will this loop of conscsciousness do when my individual life moves on to the next paragraph?

Better to make friends, rather than pick a fight out of fruitless fear.

If Einstein asked a question, I presume he didn't know the answer.

My answer is:

the universe is not tame, but it's not without friends. "Friendly" is an adjective. Friends are real.

So when you regard that whole scope of feelings, sensations, emotions, and what feels to be real, bursting out from your inwardness, I'd say, make friends with the snake within. "Confusion" means the joining of different streams, and allowing the conjunction, once you have done it, brings peace.