Imagery

A picture is worth a thousand words.

But one word paints a thousand different pictures in a thousand different minds.

Like the compound eyes of a fly, Synergy gets a much better picture of our reality when she receives one thousand perspectives not one thousand copies of the same perspective. The Datter is more clear to Eidolon when he receives uncorrupted information, rather than copies of copies of copies.

Words create an unpolluted interpretation in your mind. As soon as images are added, they taint that portrait created by your personal experience, your own flair and nuances subverted by the image presented to you. Yes, an author can more effectively get specific points across using images, diagrams, and sketches to clarify and clarity does have its time and place.

Yet when not absolutely necessary, forcing structure into the minds of the audience is a disservice bordering on contempt. Allowing the audience to generate meaning from words gives the freedom for growth, exploration and curiosity. If all the answers are easy to find, and spoon fed, life becomes quite unfulfilling and dissatisfying. None of us truly has all the answers anyway, merely our interpretation of our experience. The collation of those individual interpretations into a glorious mosaic of meaning creates the ultimate Truth.

Even assigning an image to the speaker changes the flavour of the words. Narrows the interpretation. Cues biases, judgement and filters. Once a voice becomes attached to words, all the associations of similar voices influence the listener’s response to that voice. Past pain poisons present perspective by triggered associations.

Each of us is the culmination of our experiences and history. If tapping into our wise mind, we are also accessing all experience and all history. These influence our interpretation of what we perceive, which may hinder or help our journey depending on the nature of the response.

Wisdom without confinement within images and other sensory bindings is more easily absorbed. The resonance of authentic sincerity is strongest when unfettered.

When getting a point across is necessary, the precision of words and images is a tool. When inspiring curiosity, growth, and hope, the tool of choice is ambiguity. Minds can’t seek what they are given, they can only seek what they do not have.

Manufacturing Gratitude

It’s ok not to be grateful. Especially for something you never asked for. Especially when you do not feel grateful. Especially if someone is telling you to be grateful.

Shame on them.

Gratitude is an emotion. Emotions happen when they happen, not when you tell yourself to feel them. You are sad when sad, glad when glad and mad when mad. Emotions simply are. A product of the material world, they are a sensory response to the current social environment. You can’t tell your fingers to feel warm in a snow storm. You can’t tell your face not to feel hot in the sun.

Why do you think you can tell your feelings to experience gratitude?

Gratitude bubbles up from inside you when conditions feel balanced and satisfactory…TO YOU. Your personal definition of balance or satisfaction may be wildly different than someone else’s, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with your perspective. Being told you should be grateful is being treated with contempt. It is telling you to judge yourself and your feelings, and find yourself guilty.

Beware giving yourself that same message! When you ponder your feelings and determine you shouldn’t have them, you are being unfair to yourself. Try telling your hand not to feel the burner under your palm. Same task, but because we fail to recognize our intangible emotions as an extension of our nervous system, we treat them like a part of our soul.

Emotions are information. Not actions nor facts.

Gratitude is a breathtakingly glorious emotion and it’s understandable those experiencing it want you to feel it too. Fake it til you make it, practice gratitude, choose thankfulness. Great ideas, but missing the point.

Manufacturing a facade of an emotion does generate pathways of practiced nerve patterns. Acting out routines does create habits. This much is true. But the emotion of gratitude is spontaneous and joyful, not habitualized and mechanical.

Funny thing, when it wells out of you, you realize it doesn’t want to follow those practices, routines and habits! Gratitude wants to playfully take you out of your comfort zone into your curiosity. It drives you to tears with its intensity but not to acts of creating lists.

You are grateful, or you are not. There is no try. And that’s just fine.

Dissatisfaction is a sign you are ready to grow. No matter how well-appointed the nursery might be, every child reaches the stage of needing to experience more, explore more, discover more. Gratitude and satisfaction go hand in hand, with imbalance chasing both of them away.

What imbalance exists that is pressuring for change? Curiosity demands an exploration when gratitude is nowhere to be found in a situation. And in the Moment when the source of imbalance is revealed, appreciation will flow through your veins because suddenly the game is afoot and your journey will begin!

So embrace a lack of gratitude as being the summons to the post, where you are to begin a steeplechase toward a higher level of understanding yourself. From discomfort comes growth and after growth comes gratitude!

Final Destination?

Purpose. Reason. Enlightenment. Truth. Seeking these nebulous yet desirable goals gives a sense of structure and direction for those questing.

But they are not destinations. They are vehicles. Riding within truth and enlightenment gives a much more comfortable and scenic carriage on the tracks than the economy car built on thoughts and feelings. Yet that lounge car is merely a tool, not an end in and of itself. No different than having a full bank account yet striving for more money, being enlightened and basking in that state actually indicates that true enlightenment is yet to be attained.

The wise man secluding himself on the mountaintop to meditate on meaning is surely enlightened, though?

No, not if you truly follow through on the meaning of enlightenment. If you embrace what a precious gift life and the senses and feelings give us, then withdrawing from exposure to the senses is to reject the gift. Insulating from the volatility of others is understandable and certainly safe.

And there it is.

Safety.

Boundaries. Physical, mental, emotional. The more rock solid and impervious your boundaries, the safer your core personality structure. The more you can reside within your wise brain. It makes absolute sense.

But it defeats the purpose of having the sensory and thinking minds if you only dwell in the wise mind. You can use the wise mind to tap into the secrets of the universe but Synergy knows learning by doing is the most effective way to grow. She reveals the secrets to those who listen with all their minds.

But what about those great gurus who teach mindfulness and enlightenment? Aren’t they representing the ultimate in human potential?

Yes, sharing knowledge and understanding with others is a primal drive which we were designed to do. Share. Not direct. Collaborate. Not instruct. Mentoring. Not minding. In the classroom, the people with the most experience outside the halls of academia are the ones the students gravitate toward, embrace, and soak up energy from. Leading by experience and example as a role model is the natural means of teaching, while structured lessons manufactured around set goals and defined topics is simply conveyance of information artificially packaged and mechanically received.

Teaching is noble and necessary. It takes great courage to offer of oneself, and is the essence of vulnerability. Yet it too confines the mind by locking in patterns rather than openness and flexibility since the very act of teaching is predicated on concrete, immutable concepts. Mentoring toward fluid skills is enlightened instruction.

To see truth and enlightenment as the ultimate purpose of life is to lose yourself in the luxury of the panoramic dining car and never disembark the train to touch the desert, swim with the belugas, smell the mountains or feel the wind. There is always more to discover, each day, but it requires immersion in the dirty, messy, painful and admittedly dangerous circus of life as a participant, not a leader nor an ascetic.

Two Wrongs may Make a Right

Life is about balance. When we are in balance Synergy rewards us with profound insight, peace, hope, and joy. We reward her with gratitude and curiosity. There is no right or wrong, only balance and imbalance.

But imbalance is everywhere and quickly disrupts even the most stoic and centered of us. Cycles of negativity and patterns of toxicity persist through generations, accumulating in our collective psyche like mercury bioaccumulates in fish.

We can restore balance by piling positives on our scale, which is how most people approach the issue. Sadly, this becomes an exercise in frustration because the ratio of positives to outweigh negatives can be intimidating and exhausting. It always seems to take so much more effort to build up than to tear down! Especially when intentionally seeking to restore balance this way on a personal, community, or global scale. At times, these efforts can bear fruit with immense energy expended on righting wrongs and mending fences.

We see those as right, actions that benefit others. We see as wrong actions that harm others. This is the way it should be, where things which bring us all lasting pleasure are sought and those which bring any of us pain are resisted. But we live in a deeply flawed world where all are out of balance.

Where some turn to the second way of restoring balance – transferring negativity onto someone else! Projection, rejection, abuse, murder, crime. These are all strategies to alleviate imbalance, used by those unable or unwilling to restore their inner peace by cultivating positive balance through trust, curiosity, and surrender. It is so very easy, and admittedly, so very satisfying to give in to the impulses which hurt others. At times, these efforts can bear fruit when perpetrators become victims and learn lessons from having done to them what they had done to others.

We try so hard!

And there’s the trick! To not TRY to restore balance with intention or thought or purpose. Doing so is a type of resistance to what is. Trying to save the world won’t save you. Trying to save your neighbour won’t save you. Trying to save your child won’t save you.

Synergy will guide you through restoring your inner peace and calm once you surrender to her wisdom. Surrendering actually clears the weights, alleviates the burden of imbalance for you! Once you release the pain of your emotional response to the wounds of the world and yourself. Once you accept that everything around you is the way it had to be in order for you to become what you are meant to be. Only then you will see what you need to do today to begin your journey to optimal function and ultimate peace. Everything you need already waits to be discovered, hidden in the story of your life. Your balance is unique to your needs but crucial to healing our universe and restoring the net balance.

Yes, the world has suffered. Cruel, terrible things have happened, causing pain to so many. Sharing in that pain through commiseration does not serve a higher purpose of learning from the pain. Resenting the perpetrators and sickening yourself with anger and bile does not heal the imbalance which allowed horrible things to twist our world away from joy, gratitude, and playfulness. The net balance is Synergy’s to manipulate, not ours to judge. Judgement clouds purpose and absconds with playfulness.

Accept the horrors that are. Be present in this moment to understand what it feels like. Listen for Synergy to tell you what you can do to balance yourself which will help balance the world. You can’t effect change from a position of imbalance or hypocrisy. If you are not living a life of joy, curiosity and surrender, your efforts to change the world are simply another expression of resistance which exacerbates the conditions rather than alleviates them!

We are where we are. The culmination of millenia of imbalance. But we have this moment of global pause from which to restore peace, joy, and playfulness. Two wrongs may sometimes make a right.

Visualizing verses Awaiting

‘Tell the universe what you want!’

‘Ask for what you need!’

‘Set goals and go for them’

Great advice? No…hubris.

We are but children playing at understanding what we want and need. A toddler may very clearly state she wants to eat candy all day, and her desire to do so is valid and real, but we as a parent know that she is unable to understand the biological needs which render her wish inappropriate. So we ignore the immature perspective, place a nutritious and hopefully artfully prepared and playfully enjoyed meal in front of the child to coax her to partake of what she needs rather than what she wants. Yet, a good parent does not stuff the food down her throat nor punish her for her innocent attraction to sweet and pleasurable fare.

Synergy knows what each of us needs in every moment. She sets the table for us. Yet so many remain blind to the sumptuous repast because of the fixation upon what we think we desire.

When we visualize our goals, we are the toddler fantasizing about lollipops and gum drops. When we specify what we want, we are demanding obedience from a parent who knows what is best for us, and in doing so we fail to be open and ready to feast upon the opportunity generously served to us at the periphery of our tunnel vision.

Greeting each moment with open curiosity about how our current needs will be met creates panoramic vision. Trusting Synergy to provide for us rather then instructing her to do so leaves room for us to learn from her. This does not mean doing nothing. This means being ready to do anything! This does not mean having no goals. This means being prepared to seize any goal in the moment it becomes accessible to you.

Each moment is an escape room puzzle that, if you read the clues properly, lifts you into another level in the next moment. A scaffold to take you to your highest potential. Only Synergy knows what that is, so don’t put blinders on by narrowing your options through setting premature parameters and binding boundaries.

Look around every moment and learn to recognize the tools, gifts, clues and synchronicities unique to your life journey. And then make use of them to discover what opportunity awaits you! It’s what we were designed to do.